Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
From left, Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees; Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO president; and Reps. Jared Golden (D-ME) and Donald Norcross (D-NJ) conduct a news conference to oppose an executive order by President Donald Trump that eliminated collective-bargaining rights for federal workers, July 17, 2025, in the Capitol Visitor Center.
Up until now, the go-to example of a president using his power to try to destroy unions and set back the labor movement was Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981. That move threw 11,000 dedicated workers who kept Americans safe and flight paths clear out of their jobs. It declared open season on workers who exercised their fundamental rights to improve their working conditions, sending a message to private employers that they, too, could fight worker organizing drives, break strikes, and undermine workers’ rights. And its impact—a decades-long decline in union density and workers’ bargaining power—reverberated throughout the 1980s, ’90s, and into this century.
Donald Trump has taken that playbook and weaponized it for his own War on Workers. It wasn’t enough for him to use his Department of Government Efficiency (creating inefficiencies wherever it went) to put nearly 150,000 federal employees out of work. It wasn’t enough for his administration to traumatize its own employees and threaten them with criminal prosecution for talking to the media, and even to family and friends, about what was happening to workers inside the federal government.
Now, the Trump administration has stripped workers of their unions at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). At 430,000 workers, this is by far the single biggest employer-imposed contract abrogation in American history.
Here’s why this happened—and why it matters.
Unions—specifically federal employee unions—have been in the forefront of challenging the administration’s illegal and unconstitutional actions. Those actions include firing en masse probationary employees who were doing their jobs and running roughshod over civil service protections that ensured workers’ only oaths were to the Constitution and the country, not to Donald Trump. These actions have also included shutting down entire federal agencies and drastically cutting others that served the American people and American interests around the world, including ensuring food safety, approving lifesaving drugs, combating diseases, providing relief in the wake of hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, protecting workers from being injured and consumers from being cheated, and supporting independent media. In the process, this administration has waged a campaign of terror against their own staffs.
The unions have fought back. Through lawsuits, rallies, and building solidarity across the federal government, unions have been sand in the gears of Trump’s War on Workers.
Donald Trump stripped over 400,000 workers of their union in the last few days.
And now, because he hasn’t been able to beat them fair and square, he’s opted to cheat by unilaterally canceling the contracts the unions have had with the federal government. By so doing, he has stripped federal employee unions of their ability to collectively advocate on behalf of civil servants in the workplace. Trump’s effort to make the federal government non-union again only reinforces how important the unions’ actions have been in defending the critical work of these agencies and the people in them.
Make no mistake. The Trump administration’s anti-union behavior is not just about federal employees. Donald Trump is not just a boss abusing and degrading his own workers. He’s the president of the United States declaring open season on workers. What a president says and does about workers matters. It mattered when President Reagan’s union busting of the air traffic controllers effectively told private-sector CEOs that they could bust their workers’ unions, too. Conversely, it mattered when President Biden spoke consistently about the right of workers to choose whether to form a union in their workplace; when he prioritized job quality, project labor agreements, local hiring commitments, registered apprenticeships, and child care in the use of federal funds.
It mattered when President Biden said, “I believe in collective bargaining,” and then backed it up with action. As acting U.S. labor secretary, I assisted labor and management to reach agreements at the bargaining table on numerous occasions. Because President Biden and I believed that workers deserved their fair share, and that strikes were an exercise of workers’ most fundamental rights, I came to the table not to pressure the parties to reach an agreement, but to help achieve contracts that reflected workers’ true value. During our administration, workers and employers agreed to record wage increases; improvements to benefits, training, and health and safety protections; provisions regarding the use of artificial intelligence; and guarantees of and around job security. When Joe Biden was president, petitions for union elections doubled, particularly increasing among warehouse workers, baristas, retail workers, graduate student teaching and research assistants, and others long thought too vulnerable to organize. Membership in federal-sector unions increased by nearly 20 percent in a single year.
Presidents matter. Donald Trump stripped over 400,000 workers of their union in the last few days. When Joe Biden was president, 400,000 private-sector workers became newly unionized. It isn’t a coincidence that union membership, union power, and union popularity surged under the first president to walk a picket line alongside striking workers.
Nor will it be a coincidence if Trump’s attacks on public servants invite private-sector employers to follow his lead and disregard their own existing union relationships, especially now that Trump has disabled the National Labor Relations Board by illegally firing Gwynne Wilcox and bringing the NLRB below the quorum it needs to issue decisions and hold employers accountable. His open disdain for his own employees and his combative, us-vs.-them mentality about employers and workers will inevitably lead to more labor strife. And remember, this is the president who completely shut down the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), the federal agency responsible for preventing labor strife.
Trump’s actions are short-sighted and counterproductive. Businesses—and government—flourish when workers are valued. Respecting workers’ rights to form or join a union is not just the law, it’s also a way of showing workers that they are respected enough to get a say in the conditions in which they work and in their future. Everyone benefits when workers share ideas about how to improve operations, workflow, service delivery, product quality; what tools and training are needed and how to provide them in the most effective ways; how to keep themselves safe on the job and create a culture that prioritizes health and safety; and joint problem-solving, including not just how to fix things that go wrong but preventing problems from happening in the first place. When workers have a union, there is a built-in, regular way for this to happen. I have seen employers, many of whom resisted their workers’ decision to unionize at first, realize the benefits of having a unionized workplace. But building a relationship between an employer and its workers’ union takes time, trust, and openness. The Trump administration’s anti-union actions model behavior that encourages disruption and distrust.
Unions’ causes radiate beyond their ranks. Where unions are stronger, policies that benefit all workers, like paid sick leave, better unemployment insurance benefits, and higher minimum wages, are more likely to exist. Unions help to close racial and gender pay gaps and ensure fair treatment in the workplace. In other words, unions fight for the things Donald Trump hates. It’s no surprise that he is turning out to be the union-buster in chief.
