What can state advocates, state-level labor agencies and state legislatures do to preserve and advance labor protections for workers in the face of the anti-worker actions being handed down from the second Trump administration?
Since his inauguration, Trump has taken aim at nondiscrimination protections for federal contract workers. He has also installed people close to the Project 2025 agenda in key posts, such as Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Brendan Carr as the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. Memos issued by the Office of Personnel Management have also contained metadata showing they were authored by people connected to Project 2025. Trump signed an executive order the first day of his administration to designate federal workers focused on policy to a new group, making it easier to terminate them for perceived disloyalty to his political agenda. Meanwhile Trump’s sudden requirement for all federal employees to return to the office five days a week has put caregivers at a disadvantage.
Trump also fired two key members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) last week, NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and NLRB Chair Gwynne Wilcox, a move that left the board without the number of people needed to function. Although courts have said it’s legal for Trump to fire Abruzzo, there are higher standards for taking out board members, and Gwynn is suing as a result. In addition to the possibly illegal firing of Wilcox, Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency staff, or DOGE, a largely unaccountable group created by executive order, had plans to access the agency’s data, according to Kim Kelly, a labor journalist. Labor unions filed a lawsuit to stop those plans and a temporary order is now in place to stop DOGE from getting its hands on the information.
Trump has chosen his acting heads of key labor agencies as he waits for the people he nominated for those roles to be confirmed by the Senate. Lori Chavez, a Republican House member representing Oregon, is Trump’s choice for the top spot in the U.S. Department of Labor. Chavez is one of Trump’s less controversial picks, given her support for the PRO Act, a piece of legislation that would make it easier to organize in the workplace. But despite Chavez’s support for some worker-friendly legislation, labor advocates are skeptical that Trump’s current plans for labor rules will be any different from his previous administration.
During his first term, Trump gutted rules that would have provided protections for workers to keep their tips, rolled back an Obama-era executive order that provided guardrails against discrimination for LGBTQ workers, and eliminated a rule that would have raised the threshold for overtime pay, to name just a few.
All hope is not lost when it comes to labor power at the state level.
The NLRB’s work has essentially been halted as a result of Trump’s firings, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) acting chair, Andrea Lucas, said she is taking actions to rid EEOC forms and other documents of trans-inclusive language. Trump’s Department of Labor has the power to inflict more damage to workers’ rights through the reversal of a number of Biden-era rules, such as the expansion of overtime pay, protections for people working in the heat, and regulations that would allow more workers to collectively bargain with their employers and hold them accountable for labor violations.
States Can Meaningfully Protect Workers During Trump’s Second Term
Labor advocates, national progressive think tanks and economic policy experts say that all hope is not lost when it comes to labor power at the state level. A November 2024 policy brief from the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative, National Employment Law Project, and other academic and nonprofit groups, sheds light on the ways that states can protect labor rights in 2025.
Paul Sonn, state policy director at the National Employment Law Project, told Truthout that states don’t need to wait for the Trump administration to reverse key Biden administration protections before they advance administrative or legislative protections to fill the gaps. Some of them have already been blocked in the courts by the judges Trump appointed in his first term.
“It’s not a question of whether the Trump administration will abandon any of these rules,” said Sonn. “The Trump judges are already blocking many of them. It’s urgent that many of the states act now to protect their residents from these rollbacks — and these are politically popular: very basic worker protections like the right to stronger overtime pay protections, the right to not be subject to abusive noncompete clauses that lock you in a job where you’re being harassed or prevent you from quitting to take a better job.”
Sonn said many of these are actions governors can take through their labor agencies; for example, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs could adopt a heat standard for workers if the federal heat rule is blocked, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could expand overtime pay protections in her state.
Terri Gerstein, director of NYU Wagner Labor Initiative, said even conservative states may be open to curbing noncompete agreements, which aim to stop workers from working for competitors within a certain area, as some business interests say this hampers economic activity. “It’s not like business is uniformly supportive of noncompetes. There are business owners and business organizations that really oppose noncompetes because they thwart economic dynamism and entrepreneurialism, and they want to hire the best people for their jobs,” she said.
States don’t need to wait for the Trump administration to reverse key Biden administration protections before they advance administrative or legislative protections to fill the gaps.
A Federal Trade Commission rule banning noncompetes was struck down by a Trump-appointed judge in August. However, at the state level, Louisiana and Iowa passed legislation in 2024 that regulated noncompetes in health care. In 2023, Minnesota passed a broad ban on noncompetes.
Sonn and Gerstein say legislation providing unemployment insurance for striking workers would also shore up labor power during a Trump presidency. Although a Washington State bill ensuring that striking workers receive unemployment insurance died last spring, labor advocates aren’t giving up and prefiled another bill on the issue in December, with benefits that could last as long as four weeks. The state senate committee on labor and commerce held a hearing on the bill on January 21. It’s been scheduled for an executive session in a Senate committee on labor and commerce for February 7.
State Fights for Worker Power Focus on Heat-Related Illness and Better Overtime Protections
State labor advocates say they’re looking to strengthen state regulations and laws to protect workers from exploitation on the job, such as being ordered by bosses to work for too long in extreme heat or being shuffled around their workplace to avoid being paid fair compensation.
Joe Kendo, chief of staff at the Washington State Labor Council, said the Washington branch of the AFL-CIO is preparing for a different labor environment under the Trump administration.
“Our affiliates are examining which work protections are reliant upon federal rules or administrative case law; where gaps exist, we will seek state-based regulations to bridge them. If an agency lacks the rulemaking authority to act, then we will seek statutory change,” Kendo told Truthout.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs could adopt a heat standard for workers if the federal heat rule is blocked.
“We will be paying particularly close attention to workplace safety and health regulations, but also to issues that stand to impact workforce training, labor standards on certain kinds of public works projects, and on the rights of workers to effectively negotiate with their employers,” Kendo added.
Garrett O’Connor, director of worker organizing at Make the Road New Jersey, said that as all areas of the U.S. continue to see the effects of climate change, with New Jersey coming in third among the fastest-warming states in the country, there’s a need for state-based legislation addressing workplace illness and injury resulting from extreme heat.
The deaths of three New Jersey Amazon workers in July and August 2022 was part of the impetus for advocating for these protections, O’Connor told Truthout. The legislation Make the Road New Jersey is pushing for requires state labor officials to establish a heat stress standard for workers that includes rest breaks and access to cool spaces, and limits on how long a worker is exposed to heat during the workday, among other measures. The latest effort to pass these protections was introduced in the New Jersey legislature in November.
Twenty-two states have Occupational Safety and Health Administration plans covering private sector workers as well as public sector workers, which allow states to take administrative actions on heat standards without having to pass legislation.
States can also improve overtime to reach more workers, as several states have done and continue to do after a federal rule was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge in November. The Biden administration rule would have allowed 4 million more people to qualify for overtime by raising the threshold salary from $35,568 a year to $58,656 a year for many workers. But states can and have achieved more overtime protections for workers through statute or a combination of statute and regulations, such as California, Colorado, Washington and New York, Sonn and Gerstein’s report notes.
Although many salaried workers are entitled to overtime wages, executives or professionals are not. But companies will promote workers to certain roles so that they don’t receive overtime without actually changing a lot about their role. Towards Justice in Colorado, a nonprofit legal organization focused on workers’ rights in the state, successfully campaigned to increase the threshold for employees under the “white collar” exemption during the first Trump administration. In January 2020, the Colorado Department of Labor adopted an order to increase the minimum salary threshold for exempt employees.
“Because the dollar threshold after which you can have access to that white-collar exemption has been eroded over time by inflation, it means that that dollar threshold is no longer providing appropriate protection to ensure that there’s no gaming within the system, or calling somebody a manager to no longer pay them overtime,” Towards Justice in Colorado Policy Director Nina DiSalvo told Truthout. “That overtime threshold for the white-collar exemption provides that additional layer of protection to sort of level the playing field among employers.”
Even conservative states may be open to curbing noncompete agreements.
Colorado may also see a change to a state labor law that proponents say will get rid of disincentives to organize. After a simple majority vote to unionize, workers also have to get three-fourths approval for unions to negotiate fees with all workers, even if they don’t belong to the union. Labor advocates say this puts Colorado in between a right-to-work and non-right-to-work state because there are more hurdles to the same status that non-right-to-work states enjoy. The bill advanced in the Colorado senate in January.
“This is really the moment for states to be bold on worker rights because they are playing such a critical role in making sure people have decent working conditions and dignified lives,” Gerstein said.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.