(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- For American labor, which has been embattled for decades but invigorated over the past few years, Donald Trump’s big win is a body blow.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, workers have racked up victories that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier. Historic union contracts with the Big Three automakers, Hollywood studios, UPS and Boeing. Unions freshly established at Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Chipotle and Starbucks.
The risks and burdens foisted on workers early in the Covid era had a lot to do with making those changes feel urgent. The tight labor markets the pandemic created made them seem more possible. But the Biden administration played an important part, too. A handful of key appointees took on corporate America in ways unseen in decades. The industrial policy coming out of Washington favored workers. Biden himself walked a picket line. These moves helped create openings for organized labor that Trump is likely to slam shut.
“All of that is now under threat,” says Daniel Vicente, a regional director for the United Auto Workers. “Everything becomes harder, from organizing to negotiating strong contracts to strikes.”
On the campaign trail this year, Trump courted union workers and promised many that he’d do better for them than Biden did. The last time Trump ran the government, however, he filled key enforcement roles with management-side attorneys who pushed for companies to have more control over workers’ tips, more time to run anti-union campaigns and more discretion over who gets paid overtime. Now that he’s had some practice, he’s likely to do more, faster, with “a deregulatory emphasis,” says Paul DeCamp, a corporate lawyer who served as George W. Bush’s wage and hour enforcement chief. “There’s no real preparation for being president other than having been president.”
Biden’s appointees have issued rules to eliminate noncompete agreements and make more workers eligible for overtime, and proposed regulations to protect them from excessive heat. More management-friendly regulators could work to dissolve such efforts in tandem with like-minded judges. Project 2025, the policy blueprint drawn up by Trump administration alumni and advisers, calls for the loosening of laws governing safety, nondiscrimination and child labor, and floats eliminating public-sector unions. Trump suggested on the stump that he’d give new pal Elon Musk a crack at slashing the federal budget, which would almost certainly involve downsizing. Trump’s promised crackdown on immigrants would also hand employers more leverage to scare workers out of causing a fuss.
Whether or not Republicans retake the House, Trump appointees can reshape Biden’s signature green energy legislation, whose hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks, loans and grants came with safeguards meant to promote union, or at least decent, jobs. The strength of those safeguards depends in large part on how federal agencies choose to enforce them—or not.
Trump himself could quickly defang the National Labor Relations Board, the only federal agency that can enforce most employees’ rights to unionize or protest their working conditions. Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel for Biden’s NLRB, has been one of Washington’s most ambitious worker champions over the past few 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 make the questionably legal move of firing all the Democrats on the labor board, so that he can more quickly unwind 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 such as Musk’s SpaceX have been arguing that restriction is unconstitutional.)
“President Trump redefines thinking out of the box,” says Michael Lotito, who co-chairs the government relations arm of the management-side law firm Littler. “I think everything’s on the table.”
The loss of friends in Washington will intensify some labor advocates’ efforts to secure policy gains in states and cities, such as minimum wage hikes, paid sick leave mandates and bans on mandatory anti-union meetings. Voters this week approved ballot measures on some or all of these policies in Missouri, Nebraska and (seemingly, with most votes counted) Alaska. Some such wins, however, could also be short-lived, given the massive rightward shift of the judiciary during Trump’s first term, which deterred worker advocates from bringing NLRB claims against Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. even under Biden. On Election Day, Trump-appointed appellate judges struck down a Biden requirement that government contractors pay at least $15 an hour, calling that minimum wage rule “arbitrary and capricious.”
As in so many other policy areas, 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 many Bloomberg Businessweek readers’ lives.
Whatever the details, a Trump restoration seems almost guaranteed to claw back much of the leverage that America’s workers have gained from the government under Biden. “It’s a warrant for employers to do whatever they want,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Then again, those gains weren’t just gifts from on high. Abruzzo, the NLRB general counsel, says that if the feds stop having employees’ backs, “I think workers are going to take matters into their own hands.”
Atulya Dora-Laskey, a Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. employee and a leader in her Lansing, Michigan, store’s contract talks, says the growing threats to the rights of working women, LGBTQ people and immigrants under Trump offer strong reasons for solidarity, too. “When people are feeling hopeless in the political institutions,” she says, “that is a space for unions to step in to fill the void.”
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