By Steven Greenhouse
Donald Trump
promotes himself as a friend of “forgotten” workers, but in ways large
and small his administration has undermined what has traditionally been
the biggest champion of workers: labor unions.
Most
recently, he used his authority as president to deliver a harsh Labor
Day message to the 2.1 million people who work for him, canceling pay raises for the civilian employees of the federal government. In May, he issued three executive orders
to weaken federal employees’ unions by, among other things, limiting
the subjects they can bargain over. (On Aug. 25, a judge ruled that this
move violated federal law.) In March 2017, Mr. Trump signed a law
repealing an executive order signed by President Obama that sought to
keep the federal government from awarding contracts to companies that
violate laws protecting workers’ right to unionize, as well as wage and
job safety laws.
Since
taking office, Mr. Trump has installed a conservative majority on the
National Labor Relations Board that has moved quickly to make it harder
for unions to organize. Last December, the board overturned a rule,
beloved by unions, that made it easier to organize smaller units of
workers in big factories and stores. In another board decision, his
appointees made it tougher for workers at fast-food restaurants and
other franchised operations to unionize, although that “joint employer”
ruling was vacated when a labor board member later recused himself
because of a conflict of interest. The board is also looking to slow
down unionization elections, a move that unions oppose because it would
give corporations more time to pressure workers to vote against
unionizing.
Mr. Trump’s first
nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, was the deciding vote in a
case that delivered this year’s biggest blow to workers. In Janus v.
AFSCME, the court’s conservative majority, in a 5-to-4 vote, ruled in
June that government employees can’t be required to pay any fees to the
unions that bargain for them. By allowing many government workers to
become “free riders,” that ruling is expected to chop revenues to many
public employee unions by one-tenth to one-third.
With private-sector unions badly
weakened by factory shutdowns and corporate resistance to unions,
government employee unions have become the most powerful part of the
labor movement. That’s one reason anti-union billionaires and
foundations underwrote the Janus litigation: to hobble the strongest
part of labor. The Koch brothers and other billionaires have seized on
Janus to finance efforts, through emails and door-to-door canvassing, to
urge government workers — teachers, police, firefighters, social
workers and many others — to quit their unions and stop paying union
fees.
It doesn’t look as if Mr.
Trump’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, will be a
friend to workers or unions. In an astonishingly anti-worker opinion in a
case involving a SeaWorld trainer killed by an orca whale, Mr.
Kavanaugh wrote in 2014 that the Labor Department was wrong to fine
SeaWorld. Dissenting in a 2-to-1 case, he suggested that the Labor
Department should not “paternalistically” regulate the safety of
SeaWorld’s trainers because they, like tiger tamers and bull riders,
were sports and entertainment figures who accepted the risk of injury in
hazardous businesses that usually regulated their own dangers. His
opinion had echoes of 19th-century state court rulings that factory
workers assumed the risk of injuries from machinery that cut off their
hands.
Labor unions might get a boost from Mr.
Trump’s efforts to increase coal, steel and aluminum production and from
his push to renegotiate Nafta to spur domestic auto production. The
Trump administration and many unions hope those moves will bring back
tens of thousands of mining and manufacturing jobs. That could lift
unions’ ranks, but those gains would be a fraction of the losses
expected from Janus. Some experts estimate that more than a million
workers will quit their unions over the next few years as a result of
that ruling.
There has been some good news for labor. A new Gallup Poll
found that public approval for unions has reached its highest level in
15 years. Unions have scored some significant victories recently,
especially among white collar workers: adjunct professors at many
universities have unionized, and so have journalists at The Los Angeles
Times, The Chicago Tribune, The New Yorker, HuffPost and Slate, and
graduate teaching assistants at Harvard, Columbia, Brandeis and other
universities. There have also been unionization gains among nurses and
bus drivers as well as service-sector workers in Silicon Valley.
The
labor movement in the United States is already far weaker than in any
other major industrialized nation. Just one in 10 American workers
belongs to a union, down from more than one in three in the 1950s. But
in the face of decades of fierce employer resistance, compounded by the
Trump administration’s hostility, unions are not making the gains they
need to reverse their decline. If America’s unions don’t rebound, that
will most likely mean even more income inequality and wage stagnation and even more control of the levers of power by corporations and wealthy donors.
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