Now What? How Will Labor Respond to Trump-Musk Assault on US Workers?
“[Trump] told us who he is, and now he’s doing exactly what he said he would do. We should not be shocked.” — 1199SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Milly Silva
By Steve Wishnia
In his first two weeks as President, Donald Trump launched a frontal assault on American workers, axing thousands of federal employees, illegally firing members of the National Labor Relations Board to deny it a functioning quorum, and staging immigration raids that snagged Puerto Ricans and military veterans. He installed multibillionaire neo-Nazi sympathizer Elon Musk as his personal personnel czar—who quickly threatened almost all of the 2 million federal workers that if they didn’t take a dubious buyout offer, they might be laid off or fired.
“He told us who he is, and now he’s doing exactly what he said he would do. We should not be shocked,” says 1199SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Milly Silva. “Everything he does that is anti-immigrant, anti-worker, for climate change, against public health, we need to be ready to take action.”
What form should such actions take, and how can the labor movement organize them? Which issues are most crucial? What tactics and strategy would be most effective? Work-Bites spoke to union leaders around the country and got answers ranging from politically educating members to immediate strikes.
After a slow start, resistance, from protests to lawsuits, is developing, but “the sheer volume of the onslaught has taken a lot of people aback,” says Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. The administration’s agenda of turning the government over to tech oligarchs and “obliterating the structure of democracy” is clear, but people in the labor movement are “still formulating the strategy” to counter that, he adds.
“There’s no quick fix,” he says, but it’s essential to protect immediate targets such as immigrants and trans people—in the spirit of “First They Came,” Pastor Martin Niemoller’s poem about Nazism—and then organizing, listening to members about what’s happening with them, and educating people to understand what’s really going on amidst massive misinformation.
Teamsters Local 802 President Chris Silvera says the movement must resist the Trump-Musk administration’s attacks on the NLRB and federal employees, quickly and massively.
“The unions should not allow anyone to just tell two million people ‘get the hell out,’” he argues. They need to show the government that such actions “will result in a nationwide shutdown, ports, rail, everything.”
American unions, he adds, have not done enough to educate members about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint that Trump is largely following, such as his Jan. 21 executive order ending President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 ban on racial discrimination in employment by the federal government or its contractors.
“Federal workers feel insulted by Musk and his cronies,” says Jacob Morrison, president of the North Alabama Area Labor Council in Huntsville. But in his union, American Federation of Government Employees Local 1858, there’s more sentiment to start with political pressure and organizing than for a strike right away, he adds. “We have not yet prepared the broad public-pressure campaigns.”
More than one-tenth of workers in the Huntsville area are directly employed by the government, he says, so local politicians might be more willing to listen to how layoffs would hit the local economy. But for workers who’ve already lost jobs, the union can’t do much beyond helping them with bills and waiting for the grievance procedure and unlawful-termination lawsuits to play out.
The number of federal workers who have taken Musk’s buyout offer (the administration is claiming 65,000), Morrison says, is significantly less than the 100,000 who quit or retire in a typical year. AFGE warned members that the offer’s fine print says pay is not guaranteed after March 14.
Immigration and infrastructure
The Trump administration’s efforts to deport immigrants and revoke their U.S.-born children’s constitutional right to citizenship are an immediate threat.
“Anyone who believes the right to exist in this country is a human right should stand up and speak out,” says Silva. People detained in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement workplace raid in Newark in late January included a Puerto Rican person and a military veteran, she says.
1199 does not keep track of how many of its members are immigrants, but a wall at its Manhattan offices displays the flags of more than 40 nations its members come from. The proportion is highest in home health care, Silva says.
The union is working to ensure that members know their rights if ICE—US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—shows up, and is urging employers not to obey in advance.
The New York City Central Labor Council has handed out 15,000 know-your-rights cards to immigrants, says President Vincent Alvarez. It also wants to educate members on how mass deportations are connected to the administration’s anti-worker policies, and “won’t improve job opportunities for U.S.-born workers.”
There are also more than 50,000 federal workers in New York City, Alvarez points out.
Building-trades unions, Alvarez further adds, are also worried Trump and Musk might cost them thousands of jobs by arbitrarily cancelling infrastructure projects approved under the Biden administration. In New York State, that includes more than 500 projects, worth $22 billion.
That’s also an issue in Alabama, says Morrison. But surprisingly, he adds, Trump has not yet revoked President Biden’s executive order for project-labor agreements, which require union-scale wages on federally funded projects—even though that was one of Project 2025’s main labor proposals.
Resistance emerges
In Vermont, “we’re lucky to have a pretty friendly legislature,” says Larry Moquin, president of the Vermont State Labor Council. Last year, it approved an amendment to the state constitution to protect the right to collective bargaining, and explicitly prohibit “right to work for less” laws. The amendment will go before voters in November 2026.
Workers in Vermont, he says, are mainly concerned with being able to afford housing, food, and health care—with some health-care workers in debt to their employer. It’s the labor movement’s duty, he adds, “to educate not only our members on what’s really happening,” as people working two or three jobs don’t have time to follow news.
“We can’t back down,” Moquin says. The middle class has been declining since the Reagan era, and “it’s going to be extinct if things don’t change.”
Nevertheless, he continues, “we can’t be partisan.” That’s a more plausible claim in New England than in most of the country: Moquin’s Laborers local covers part of New Hampshire, where several attempts to enact right-to-work-for-less laws have been defeated with the aid of pro-labor Republican legislators.
Meanwhile, a federal judge in Boston on Feb. 6 put a hold on the buyout offer’s deadline, responding to a lawsuit by AFGE, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and the National Association of Government Employees. The unions argue that the offer is part of a scheme “to wipe away longstanding civil-service protections and merit system principles mandated by Congress with strokes of a pen.”
AFGE and AFSCME have also filed a suit challenging Schedule F, Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order eliminating civil-service protections from an estimated 50,000 federal workers by reclassifying them as political policy appointees—to enable him to punish “career Federal employees resisting and undermining” his policies and directives.
Morrison says Trump and Musk’s policies have provoked an opposite reaction: AFGE Local 1858’s membership has increased by 20% in the last two weeks, to 1,000, while the national union has added 10,000 members.
“Generations of worker struggle will not die out under this administration, not on our watch,” April Sims, president of the Washington State Labor Council, wrote in the council’s publication The Stand on Feb. 5. “I urge us all to choose to fight back….I call on us to choose working-class solidarity. Our dignity as working people is worth fighting for.”