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FOR American labor, which has been fought for for decades but has been strengthened in recent years, Donald Trump’s big victory is a blow to the body.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, workers have achieved victories that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. Historic union contracts with the Big Three automakers, Hollywood studios, UPS and Boeing. Unions newly formed at Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Chipotle and Starbucks.
The risks and burdens imposed on workers early in the Covid era had a lot to do with making these changes seem urgent. The tight labor markets created by the pandemic made these opportunities seem more possible. But the Biden administration also played an important role.
A handful of key appointees took on corporate America in a way unseen in decades. The industrial policies that came out of Washington favored workers. Biden himself walked a picket line. These moves have helped create openings for organized labor that Trump is likely to slam shut.
“All of that is now under threat,” said Daniel Vicente, regional director of the United Auto Workers. “Everything becomes more difficult, from organizing to negotiating strong contracts and strikes.”
During his campaign this year, Trump courted union workers, promising many that he would do a better job for them than Biden. The last time Trump led the administration, however, he served in key enforcement roles with lawyers on the management side pushing for companies to have more control over workers’ tips, more time to wage anti-union campaigns and more discretion over who gets paid overtime.
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Now that he’s had some experience, he’s likely to do more and faster, with “a deregulatory emphasis,” said Paul DeCamp, a corporate lawyer who served as George W. Bush’s head of wage and hour enforcement. “There is no real preparation for being president other than having been president.”
Biden’s appointees have issued rules to eliminate non-compete agreements and make more workers eligible for overtime pay, and proposed regulations to protect them from excessive heat. More management-friendly regulators could work with like-minded judges to try to unwind such efforts.
Project 2025, the policy blueprint created by Trump administration alumni and advisers, calls for relaxing safety, non-discrimination and child labor laws and advocates eliminating public sector unions.
Trump suggested on the stump that he would give new friend Elon Musk a chance to cut the federal budget, which would almost certainly entail a reduction. Trump’s promised crackdown on immigrants would also give employers more power to stop workers from causing a ruckus.
Whether or not Republicans retake the House of Representatives, Trump appointees could reform Biden’s signature green energy legislation, whose hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks, loans and subsidies came with safeguards intended to protect unions, or at least decent jobs.
The strength of these safeguards depends in large part on how federal agencies choose to enforce them – or not.
Trump himself could quickly thwart the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the only federal agency that can enforce the rights of most workers to join a union or protest their working conditions.
Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel for Biden’s NLRB, has been one of Washington’s most ambitious labor champions in recent years. Trump will have the power to fire her on Day 1, just as Biden did with her predecessor.
Some business advocates are also urging Trump to take the questionably legal step of firing all Democrats on the labor board so he can more quickly undo the union-friendly rulings of the Biden years. (The law says NLRB members can only be fired for “neglect of duty or malfeasance,” but companies like Musk’s SpaceX have argued that restriction is unconstitutional.)
“President Trump is redefining out-of-the-box thinking,” said Michael Lotito, co-chairman of law firm Littler’s government relations department on the management side. “I think everything is on the table.”
The loss of friends in Washington will intensify efforts by some labor advocates to secure policy gains in states and cities, such as minimum wage increases, paid sick leave and a ban on mandatory anti-union rallies. Voters this week approved ballot measures for some or all of these policies in Missouri, Nebraska and (apparently, with most votes counted) Alaska.
However, some such victories could also be short-lived, given the massive rightward shift of the judiciary during Trump’s first term, which prevented worker advocates from filing NLRB claims against Uber Technologies and Lyft, even under Biden.
On Election Day, Trump-appointed appellate judges struck down a Biden requirement that government contractors be paid at least $15 an hour, calling that minimum wage rule “arbitrary and capricious.”
As in so many other areas of policy, Trump’s most lasting legacy on labor may well be the Supreme Court. If Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas retire during his next term, the new majority of Trump-appointed justices could well remain in place for the rest of the lives of many Bloomberg Businessweek readers.
Whatever the details, a Trump reinstatement seems all but guaranteed to regain much of the influence American workers gained from the administration under Biden.
“It’s a guarantee for employers to do what they want,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
But then again, those profits weren’t just gifts from above. Abruzzo, the NLRB general counsel, says that if the FBI no longer has the backbone of its employees, “I think the employees will take matters into their own hands.”
Atulya Dora-Laskey, a Chipotle Mexican Grill employee and leader in contract negotiations at her store in Lansing, Michigan, says the growing threats to the rights of working women, LGBTQ people and immigrants under Trump also provide strong reasons for solidarity .
“When people feel hopeless in political institutions,” she says, “that’s a space for unions to step in to fill the void.” BLOOMBERG