Donald Trump Has Launched a War Against the Working Class

The Trump administration has wasted no time attacking worker rights and bestowing even more power to employers through a barrage of anti-worker executive orders since Trump’s second term began.

Within his first two weeks in office, Trump rapidly targeted LGBTQIA+ workers and undid civil rights protections. He fired two Democratic commissioners on the five-person Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). He terminated Chair Charlotte Burrows, whose term was supposed to last until July 2028, and Vice Chair Jocelyn Samuels, whose term was supposed to last until July 2026. He also fired EEOC General Counsel Karla Gilbride, whose four-year term wasn’t supposed to end until 2027.

These moves leave only the commission without a quorum, which means that the organization taxed with enforcing federal laws against job discrimination is effectively powerless.

The 60-year executive order granting the Department of Labor the necessary tools to protect the civil rights of federal contract workers was rolled back and the department was ordered to stop ongoing investigations into civil rights violations. The president also fired more than a dozen inspectors at government agencies, including the Department of Labor.

The “Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order is a clear attack on trans people, including in the workplace. The move directs agencies like the Department of Labor and the EEOC to rescind its updated workplace harassment policies, which include protections for trans and gender-nonconforming people.

The administration also signed an order barring transgender people from serving in the military, a move that could eject nearly 15,000 people over their identity; rescinded a Biden administration executive order that directed employers to strengthen protections for LGBTQ people; instructed federal workers to delete their pronouns from email signatures; and removed documents connected to LGBTQ protections from the EEOC website.

Gutting the Federal Workforce

The president has instituted a federal hiring freeze, mandated a return to the office for nearly every remote federal worker, and reclassified thousands of federal employees in order to make them easier to fire. He also sent out a government-wide email inviting federal workers to quit their jobs as part of a “deferred resignation program” that would pay them through September.

A group of unions (the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE); AFGE Local 3707; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); and the National Association of Government Employees) are suing Trump over that program.

“We are filing this lawsuit to stop the purge of qualified professionals from the federal government workforce. Not only are these actions illegal and a scam, but they are eroding the health and well-being of our communities,” said AFSCME President Lee Saunders in a statement. “These workers do everything from making sure families receive their Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits on time to protecting our drinking water and the food we eat to overseeing our national security. If this chaos goes unchecked, it will have devastating impacts on working people.”

“A climate of fear makes our workplaces and communities less safe. Mass deportation policies threaten civil liberties, encourage racial profiling, separate families and cause massive economic and emotional hardship.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that the administration is on the verge of implementing an executive order that would fire thousands of federal health workers and Trump has moved to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which employs 10,000 people.

He’s also submitted regulations to weaken federal worker protections, signed an executive order to reduce the size of the federal workforce, and fired a Democratic member of the federal employee appeals board.

The Economic Policy Institute’s Senior Policy Analyst Margaret Poydock told Truthout that these moves are “aimed at gutting the federal workforce and politicizing the career civil service.”

NLRB Immobilized

Labor advocates had anticipated Trump would revamp the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to suit his administration’s corporate agenda, but how it would unfold when he took office had remained unclear.

He fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo right away, which was expected. However rather than going through the usual steps of appointing a partisan majority, he also fired Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the board. The move is unprecedented in addition to being against the law, and Wilcox said she is “pursuing all legal avenues to challenge [her] removal.” On February 1, Trump fired Abruzzo’s successor, Acting General Counsel Jessica Rutter.

The firings reduced the board to just two members, which means that, like the EEOC, the board lacks a quorum and cannot issue any decisions or regulations. This allows companies to ignore labor law by dragging out cases in which a board ruling is needed.

Employers are already using the development to their advantage. After Whole Foods workers voted to unionize in Philadelphia, the company asked the NLRB to overturn the victory. “In the absence of a Board quorum, the Regional Director lacks statutory authority to investigate objections or certify the results, or otherwise engage in representation case procedures, including investigating objections or conducting the objections process,” reads the filing.

At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern points out that the goal of these firings may extend beyond impeding another federal agency.

A depleted NLRB sets the stage for Trump to terminate the 1935 precedent Humphrey’s Executor, a decision that allowed Congress to protect independent agencies from partisan interference and prohibited the president from removing members of such agencies. The GOP-controlled Supreme Court has essentially been circling the decision in recent years, expanding the president’s power to fire regulators, but so far that precedent has only applied to multimember commissions.

“If the Supreme Court does scrap Humphrey’s, it will probably unleash a spate of firings across other independent agencies,” writes Stern.

Jack Goldsmith, who ran the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, told The New York Times that the Trump administration might have made the moves in hopes of igniting legal challenges.

“On one level, this seems designed to invite courts to push back because much of it is illegal and the overall message is a boundless view of executive power,” said Goldsmith. “But really, they are clearly setting up test cases.”

Destroying the NLRB has been a long-time goal of billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk. In January 2024, Musk’s SpaceX company launched a lawsuit against the board after it accused the GOP megadonor of illegally firing workers. In November 2024, SpaceX and Amazon entered the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to argue that the NLRB is unconstitutional.

Crackdown on Immigrant Workers

In addition to heightening Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, the Trump administration has also taken legislative steps to punish immigrants. In January, Trump signed the Laken Riley Act, which found bipartisan support in the House weeks before he took office and in the Senate just hours after Joe Biden left. Framed by lawmakers as a bill aimed at protecting people from violence, the bill allows states to weaponize the law against the most vulnerable members of communities. With its passage, enforcement officers are allowed to indefinitely detain immigrants without bail, just for being accused of nonviolent, low-level crimes.

“A climate of fear makes our workplaces and communities less safe. Mass deportation policies threaten civil liberties, encourage racial profiling, separate families and cause massive economic and emotional hardship for millions of working people across the country,” read a statement from the AFL-CIO from a recent Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing. “The terror instilled by raids and targeting means that fewer people report crimes, visit a doctor, or send their kids to school — all of which undermines the health, wellbeing and safety of our communities.”

Fighting Back

As seen during the first Trump administration, many opponents will attempt to counter his political agenda in courts and in the halls of Congress. However, myriad legal challenges did not stop Trump from retaking power, and many perceive the Democratic response to the administration’s overreach as inadequate.

Some of the most crucial battles will take place in the workplace and on the streets.

Recent examples of this disconnect include the Democrats’ failure to extend former NLRB Chair Lauren McFerran’s term, their insistence on launching task forces as opposed to actual plans and Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s claim that the party lacks the leverage to stop Trump.

The work of progressive lawmakers and the work of attorneys will no doubt be important in the coming years, but some of the most crucial battles will take place in the workplace and on the streets. Direct action and coordinated pressure are already having an impact.

In Chicago, the immigrant rights movement launched education campaigns to counter the imminent ICE raids.

“The city’s vast networks of workers’ centers, unions, and community organizations have spent months preparing, disbursing flyers and cards, and sending the message to residents: Don’t talk to ICE,” Sarah Lazare and Rebecca Burns explained in an In These Times article. “The two-hour training at Arise Chicago’s offices yesterday night was the organization’s sixth in-house training that month, and just one of numerous actions taking place across the city to defend immigrant residents.”

Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan has openly complained that such education is impeding ICE from deporting people. “Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult,” he recently told CNN. ​“For instance, Chicago … they’ve been educated on how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE.”

After labor reporter Kim Kelly revealed that Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was planning to access the internal systems of the Department of Labor, hundreds of workers showed up outside the Frances Perkins Building to protest the move. “This is about our health,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told the crowd. “This is about our safety. This is about our jobs,” she declared. “Mine workers, construction workers, laborers, nurses — all are protected by DOL [Department of Labor]. And because of the people in this building, we can stand up.”

On the same day, a coalition of unions filed a lawsuit aimed at blocking Musk’s team from accessing Department of Labor files.

In response to the backlash, Musk’s ​“kickoff meeting” at the Department of Labor was reportedly moved from an in-person event to a virtual one, proof that any form of backlash can potentially impede the administration’s designs.

A recent Washington Post article details how some federal employees are engaging in workplace resistance to fight back, which includes workers creating an encrypted chat to shield the administration from sensitive data and marking emails from Trump as spam — “just to piss them off.”

“The 2.3 million civilian federal workers have found themselves on the front lines of Trump’s war against the bureaucracy, and, in ways cosmetic and substantive, some are mounting a defense,” the article explains.

The last couple weeks have been a whirlwind, but the Trump administration is just starting to implement its policy agenda. The next four years will be filled with battles for the working class and it remains to be seen what form those will take.