It’s a strange Labor Day all around.
Everyday living is costlier than a year ago or four years ago, with prospects for health, rent, and electricity costs worsening as tariffs and a whole lot of attention seems trained on investors and the needs of billionaires rather than those celebrated on this holiday.
For Donald Trump, acknowledging Labor Day might be awkward, since he is on track to dismiss 300,000 federal workers by the end of the year through cuts and erasures of federal agencies.
Just this week, Trump extended his attacks on collective bargaining agreements with a new executive order stripping union rights from workers at NASA, the International Trade Association, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the Bureau of Reclamation and others.
Even by Trump standards, it seems an odd way to commemorate a day set aside to recognize decades of worker progress on pay, benefits and rights. Someone might have whispered in his ear about the timing.
Across the nation, there are more than a thousand rallies scheduled for today to denounce Trump, the effects of his government on workers and work in general, on the growing gap he is promoting between rich and poor — basically everything Labor Day has come to represent.
Protest rallies are being organized by the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions and dozens of partner organizations, including Public Citizen, Indivisible, Democracy Forward, MoveOn and Patriotic Millionaires.
Specific union-labeled targets include policies that rescind collective bargaining right from 1 million federal workers, cutting minimum wage requirements for federal contractors, a proposal to eliminate federal minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million childcare and home care workers and rescission of minimum wage requirement for disabled workers.
More generally, the combination of making permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while cutting access to health care and Medicaid will be the subject of much organized protests. Protestors will be chanting against Trump ridicule and debasement for diversity and inclusion, destruction of climate and environmental rules, erasure of agencies, and the cruel excesses of Trump’s mass deportation efforts.
Focus on Workers and Workplaces
Unionized or not, the workplace and workers have become a central focus for dissent for an overbearing presidency that seems to recognize no limits for dictatorial propaganda about pay, costs, tariffs and supply lines, and government stakes in some businesses over others.
Recent unprecedented Trump moves to demand — and be given — ownership stakes in Intel computer chip manufacture or Nippon’s takeover of U.S. Steel (without worker pay guarantees) smack of hypocrisy as Trump jumps on “communist” Zohran Mamdani as a candidate for New York City mayor.
Indeed, the policies of this Trump administration and a neutered Republican-majority Congress make it easy to argue that Trump is promoting the interests of businesses and investors over the fate of workers and families. The cost of living is rising faster than pay again, boosted now by the effects of tariffs just starting to kick in. Prices at the supermarket show immediate effects, but there are broad ripples affecting every business large and small that depends on foreign-produced parts and goods.
For his part, Trump is going out of his way to rewrite the standards of accountability, challenging any jobs report, for example, that seems less than golden, and even firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for issuing it. It was amusing this week to hear the White House rely on crime statistics in Washington, D.C. for showing a drop in crime with deployed National Guardsmen after having trashed the same figures as “rigged” the week before.
Immigration arrests have focused on day labor sites outside Home Depot or on farms and workplaces where migrant workers dominate. Of course, it is only workers who are arrested and quickly deported, not business owners.
The Trump insistence on manufacturing as a measure of U.S. economic success is overlooking what happens to teachers, health workers, creatives, and others. The Trump insistence on promises of investment is proving empty when it never arrives and plants close because of tariffs and cost rises. Trump insistence that he is America’s savior as he divides the country by race, identity and income while saying diversity doesn’t matter is speaking for itself.
Looking to Politics
Labor Day also has been a traditional kickoff for politics in states with off-cycle elections.
We’re seeing that in states like New Jersey and Virginia, where there are races for governor, pro- and anti-Trump sentiment is demonstrably part of the campaigns. Even in New York’s mayoral race, Trump is acting as if he is on the ballot, and, to an extent, voters say they are responding that a vote for Mamdani is somehow a vote to reject Trump policies.
Though the mid-term congressional elections are a year away — and presidential voting three years away — there is active concern now about Trump and Republican manipulation of elections through redistricting in Texas and under consideration in Indiana to change the rules. Trump himself is calling for elimination of mail-in ballots, though he has neither the authority nor the power to do that.
We’ve seen Democratic Governors Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois, Kathy Hochul of New York, and Wes Moore of Maryland offer retaliatory rhetoric about redistricting to eliminate Republican districts, and television pundits warn that Trump’s goal is to devise emergency conditions to delay or eliminate voting altogether.
The election map says it will be difficult for Democrats to win majorities in both houses of Congress, though several recent elections, including one significant Iowa State Senate contest this week flipped from Republican to Democratic wins by sizeable margins.
Trump policies have made workplaces and the politics of solution much more difficult.
Happy Labor Day.
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