Labor Unions Prepare to Protect Workers, No Matter What

The labor movement in the United States is showing signs of growth after decades of union membership declining as a share of the workforce. More workers are organizing their workplaces, and unions added thousands of members last year. A record high number of people across the U.S. also have a favorable view of unions and want them to have more influence, according to a 2023 Gallup poll. 

The upcoming presidential election will be critical for these growing unions and their workers. The candidates offer contrasting approaches to engaging with organized labor and regulating the world of work. While former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, have tried to fashion themselves as champions of working people, experts, including those leading some of the nation’s largest unions, call this rhetoric bogus.

“[We’ve] seen what a prior Trump administration did for workers, like replacing an Obama overtime rule with a less protective version, trying to make it easier for employers to take workers’ tips, and making it easier to misclassify employees as independent contractors—taking away their rights to minimum wage and overtime,” says Rajesh Nayak, a fellow at the Harvard Center for Labor and a Just Economy. “Those policies can undermine organizing by making workers feel like the laws are stacked against them.”

Nayak says he expects more of the same anti-worker policies from Trump if he were reelected this November. “You can see it in Project 2025, which promises to undo many of the pro-organizing positions taken by the Biden National Labor Relations Board [NLRB],” he says.

Project 2025, the presidential playbook drawn up by the Heritage Foundation, to which at least 140 of Trump’s former staffers contributed, promises to disrupt labor agencies, including the NLRB, a low-profile but high-impact government office tasked with enforcing labor laws in relation to collective bargaining and unfair labor practices. 

President Joe Biden made pro-union appointments at several federal agencies, including the NLRB. Under Biden, the board has issued rulings that make unionizing easier for workers, including widening the scope of protected organizing activities and implementing a more protective threshold for determining whether employees have been misclassified as independent contractors and are being denied their rights. 

A second Trump administration is expected to reverse this momentum. Project 2025 calls on Trump to fire the NLRB’s Biden-appointed general counsel after taking office, despite precedent that the general counsel serve the remainder of their four-year term even under a new administration. (Biden was actually the first to break this long-held precedent when he fired Trump appointee Peter Robb in January 2021, 10 months before Robb’s term would have ended, to replace him with a candidate who would be less hostile to unions.)

Project 2025 also calls for cutting budgets at labor agencies “to the low end of the historical average.” While the NLRB has been stronger under Biden than it was during Trump’s first term, it still lacks the funding it needs to fulfill its mission. Additional cost-cutting could weaken its enforcement powers further and heighten barriers for workers and unions to seek recourse for unfair labor practices or access other essential support. 

Nayak also expects a second Trump administration to bury unions in paperwork, for example, by reinstating duplicative reporting rules that the Biden administration rescinded in 2021. “Project 2025 threatens to repeat a long-running anti-union playbook of layering more and more reporting requirements on unions that go well beyond transparency and just serve to slow them down,” he says. 

It’s not only Project 2025 that promises a hostile approach to workers and unions. Trump offered a grim preview of his labor policies during his first term in office, appointing anti-union officials to labor agencies, rolling back basic workplace protections, and selecting the conservative Supreme Court justices who would go on to rule that the nation’s entire public sector is “right to work.” That decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees made a significant dent in the member-fees-based revenue of public sector unions. (Though it should be noted that the ruling has not reduced membership as much as the anti-union firm that argued the case might have hoped.)

If he were reelected, Trump is expected to take aim again at unionized public sector workers. Project 2025 urges the administration to “consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place” and promises to revive a trio of executive orders targeting federal employees that Trump was unable to force through in his first term. The orders would shorten the timeline for unions and agencies to negotiate contracts, reduce the time workers would be allowed to improve their performance before being terminated, and reduce the hours that union representatives are allowed to spend doing union-related activities on government time.

Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents tens of thousands of federal workers across 35 departments and agencies, says these executive orders “were designed to decimate federal employee bargaining rights and the ability of unions to represent them.”

The highest-profile threat that a second Trump administration poses to federal workers is an executive order called Schedule F. If passed, it would remove civil service protections for many federal employees and reclassify them as at-will appointees who can be fired for any reason. This policy would allow candidates in critical government positions to be hired and fired based on their partisan leanings and willingness to follow orders rather than their qualifications and skill sets.

“The policy makes it easier for politicians to push bureaucrats to act in ways that allow them to violate the law and undermine the public interest,” explains Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. “Civil servants take an oath to serve the Constitution, but Schedule F would force them to choose between serving that oath and serving whoever occupies the White House,” he continues.

Trump tried implementing Schedule F at the end of his first term in 2020, but it was never fully realized. “If Schedule F had been fully implemented in 2020, thousands of employees could have lost their civil service protections, been fired at will, and replaced with partisan loyalists,” warns Greenwald. 

The policy could have wide-ranging effects far beyond the federal workforce. Many people would experience this in the breakdown of vital government functions that are often taken for granted, such as enforcing food or workplace safety regulations. If qualified experts are forced out of regulating agencies in favor of appointees who are politically aligned with the administration, those agencies will become less competent and less able to deliver results.

Moynihan says Schedule F is a dangerous policy under any administration—Democrat or Republican. However, under Trump, it carries unique risks. “That is because Trump has shown himself to embrace authoritarian positions, ignoring the rule of law and wanting to use state power to suppress dissent and attack his enemies. With Schedule F, he would be able to do what authoritarians in other countries have done to consolidate his power—purge the bureaucracy of anyone who opposes democratic backsliding.”

To refuse the hostile anti-worker and anti-democracy policies of a second Trump term, many of the nation’s largest unions are backing Kamala Harris for president. As soon as she announced her candidacy, Harris gave the keynote address at the American Federation of Teachers convention. That union and almost every other major union nationwide has endorsed the current vice president. 

The groups aren’t just opposing Trump, they are also bracing for a potential second Trump term. In July, Gwen Mills, president of Unite Here, which represents workers in the hotel and food service industries, told HuffPost that she expects her union to be forced to “play defense” if Trump is elected. 

For Greenwald of NTEU, the best defense is a good offense. To help protect employees against future implementation of Schedule F, NTEU proposed a new rule reaffirming that employees keep their rights even if they are involuntarily reclassified. The Office of Personnel Management affirmed and issued that rule earlier this year. 

NTEU is also renegotiating contracts now to avoid having to do so under a possible Trump administration. “Our experience from President Trump’s first term is that his administration did not negotiate in good faith when contracts came open,” Greenwald says. “It only makes sense that employees would fare better if there are fully and fairly negotiated contracts in place and not subject to renegotiation during a second possible Trump term.”

Nayak urges other federal employee unions to do the same. He also suggests that all unions and other labor organizations be informed about what the candidates’ platforms offer to help their members understand the possible outcomes and make informed decisions at the ballot box.

He offers one silver lining: “If President Trump wins this November, he’s not going to automatically reverse the very real momentum that unions have had in this country. We’ve seen it both in public opinion surveys and on-the-ground organizing activity, and it’s not going away that easily.” Greenwald agrees, saying union leaders are “prepared to fight” if the next administration is anti-labor.