WASHINGTON—The AFL-CIO is stepping up its campaign against Donald Trump’s attacks on workers and depredations against their unions both in the streets and in courts—again—as July turned into August and headed for Labor Day.
The “streets” part will stretch from New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles to Dallas, Decatur, Corpus Christi, the Twin Cities, St. Louis, Atlanta, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Seattle and D.C., with more sites for rallies, speeches, leafleting, picnics and worker leaders campaigning, all on Labor Day.
Plans and signups for individual events are on the new website, WorkersDeserve.org.
The federation’s latest lawsuit against Trump’s massive union-busting concentrates on the 1.5 million workers—75% of all of them—who lost their collective bargaining rights, but also reveals Trump’s discrimination in favor of cops and for selected workers at law enforcement agencies. The others, Trump declared, are members of “hostile” unions.
That contrast violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection of the laws clause, the federation says.
The events mark a “Labor Day week of action” following the federation’s two coast-to-coast buses. On the “freedom, fairness and security” tour, union leaders are talking with and listening to workers about the disasters the Republican president and his congressional backers—aided and abetted by corporate leaders—have visited on them.
Send a clear message
“Working people will send a clear message to greedy CEOs, billionaires and anti-worker politicians: We built this country, and we’re taking it back,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler declared.
“Big corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk and President Trump launched the biggest attacks on unions in history because they know that when we stand together, we have the power to speak out and fight back.”
Workers, she said, demand “to create a better future where we all earn fair wages, and have good health care, a secure retirement, and the dignity we deserve on the job. It’s better in a union—and we won’t stop until all workers have a fair shot to join one.”
AFT/Teachers President Randi Weingarten, speaking at an informal Senate Democratic roundtable the week before, gave a specific example of the contrast between what Trump wants and what workers want.
“They zeroed out the funds for community schools” to help “pay” for Trump’s $4.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the 1%, she said. The community schools money “goes right to the kids in schools, the majority of which are in red states,” she added.
When Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, who organized the session, asked if the U.S. public at large knew about the cuts, the answer from school advocates, Weingarten included, was “no.”
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for D.C., again challenges Trump’s mass revocation of union contracts covering more than a million federal workers—but with a twist.
It also reveals which federal workers and unions keep their union contracts. Virtually all were in the military, or cops, or both.
And in shades of what right-wing Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wis., did 14 years ago with his infamous, and now unconstitutional, Act 10, the few unions that supported Trump are exempt from his contract terminations.
Sets comprehensive framework
The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, it says, “sets forth a comprehensive framework governing collective bargaining in the federal civil service designed to meet the special requirements and needs of the government.”
“It rests on Congress’s explicit finding that the statutory protection of the right of employees to organize, bargain collectively, and participate through labor organizations of their own choosing in decisions which affect them…safeguards the public interest.”
Trump’s executive order banning bargaining for the overwhelming majority of federal workers “is staggering and unprecedented in its breadth,” the lawsuit declares.
“It sweeps up four Cabinet departments in their entirety, including the Department of Defense,” plus two more departments “each with a single limited exception,” and dozens of agencies and subdivisions within five other departments, including the Department of Homeland Security.”
Trump also trashed collective bargaining, again using “national security” as his reason, in “seven independent agencies in their entirety, including the Environmental Protection Agency.”
The executive order contains a blanket carveout that preserves collective bargaining for all ‘police officers, security guards, [and] firefighters.’ This carveout of safety and law enforcement workers makes no logical sense in light of the exclusion of most other federal employees on the purported ground of national security,” it adds.
As an example, the federation’s Metal Trades Department and the Professional and Technical Engineers “have bargaining units at the Portsmouth (N.H.) Naval Shipyard excluded” from his executive order, and those federal workers’ rights would survive.
“Whereas the Fire Fighters have a bargaining unit at the shipyard that is not excluded by the executive order,” the suit adds. There’s a similar situation at the Defense Department: Building trades workers there can keep their contracts. Everybody else can’t.
That’s not only contrary to civil service law, but—for the Fire Fighters—it’s contrary to the Constitution’s equal protection mandate, the suit says.
“President Trump supports constructive partnerships with unions who work with him,” a Trump fact sheet accompanying his collective bargaining ban says. “The fact sheet emphasizes: ‘Law Enforcement Unaffected. Police and firefighters will continue to collectively bargain,” a Trump statement contradicted by the situation in Portsmouth.
“The country’s largest law enforcement union, the National Fraternal Order of Police, endorsed President Trump’s candidacy in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and President Trump has regularly touted those endorsements,” adds the fact sheet, which the suit quotes.
Given its members’ track record over the decades of cracking unionists’ heads, or worse, unions do not consider the FOP a member of organized labor.
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