https://truthout.org/articles/donald-trump-has-launched-a-war-against-the-working-class
News Analysis
Economy & Labor
News Analysis
Economy & Labor
Donald Trump Has Launched a War Against the Working Class
The next four years will be filled with battles as resistance springs up amid the administration’s assault on workers.
by Michael Arria
February 16, 2025
Truthout
Protesters gather at a rally organized by the American Federation of Government Employees against the “Department of Government Efficiency” purges and resignation offers made to the federal civilian workforce, outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on February 11, 2025. ALLISON ROBBERT / AFP via Getty Images
The Trump administration has wasted no time attacking worker rights and bestowing even more power to employers through a barrage of anti-worker executive orders since Trump’s second term began.
Within his first two weeks in office, Trump rapidly targeted LGBTQIA+ workers and undid civil rights protections. He fired two Democratic commissioners on the five-person Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). He terminated Chair Charlotte Burrows, whose term was supposed to last until July 2028, and Vice Chair Jocelyn Samuels, whose term was supposed to last until July 2026. He also fired EEOC General Counsel Karla Gilbride, whose four-year term wasn’t supposed to end until 2027.
These moves leave only the commission without a quorum, which means that the organization taxed with enforcing federal laws against job discrimination is effectively powerless.
The 60-year executive order granting the Department of Labor the necessary tools to protect the civil rights of federal contract workers was rolled back and the department was ordered to stop ongoing investigations into civil rights violations. The president also fired more than a dozen inspectors at government agencies, including the Department of Labor.
The “Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order is a clear attack on trans people, including in the workplace. The move directs agencies like the Department of Labor and the EEOC to rescind its updated workplace harassment policies, which include protections for trans and gender-nonconforming people.
The next four years will be filled with battles as resistance springs up amid the administration’s assault on workers.
by Michael Arria
February 16, 2025
Truthout
Protesters gather at a rally organized by the American Federation of Government Employees against the “Department of Government Efficiency” purges and resignation offers made to the federal civilian workforce, outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on February 11, 2025. ALLISON ROBBERT / AFP via Getty ImagesThe Trump administration has wasted no time attacking worker rights and bestowing even more power to employers through a barrage of anti-worker executive orders since Trump’s second term began.
Within his first two weeks in office, Trump rapidly targeted LGBTQIA+ workers and undid civil rights protections. He fired two Democratic commissioners on the five-person Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). He terminated Chair Charlotte Burrows, whose term was supposed to last until July 2028, and Vice Chair Jocelyn Samuels, whose term was supposed to last until July 2026. He also fired EEOC General Counsel Karla Gilbride, whose four-year term wasn’t supposed to end until 2027.
These moves leave only the commission without a quorum, which means that the organization taxed with enforcing federal laws against job discrimination is effectively powerless.
The 60-year executive order granting the Department of Labor the necessary tools to protect the civil rights of federal contract workers was rolled back and the department was ordered to stop ongoing investigations into civil rights violations. The president also fired more than a dozen inspectors at government agencies, including the Department of Labor.
The “Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order is a clear attack on trans people, including in the workplace. The move directs agencies like the Department of Labor and the EEOC to rescind its updated workplace harassment policies, which include protections for trans and gender-nonconforming people.
As Trump Attacks Federal Labor Protections, How Can States Protect Workers?
From limits on heat exposure to overtime rules, states can fill in some gaps as Trump dismantles federal protections.
by Casey Quinlan
Truthout
February 9, 2025
The administration also signed an order barring transgender people from serving in the military, a move that could eject nearly 15,000 people over their identity; rescinded a Biden administration executive order that directed employers to strengthen protections for LGBTQ people; instructed federal workers to delete their pronouns from email signatures; and removed documents connected to LGBTQ protections from the EEOC website.
Gutting the Federal Workforce
The president has instituted a federal hiring freeze, mandated a return to the office for nearly every remote federal worker, and reclassified thousands of federal employees in order to make them easier to fire. He also sent out a government-wide email inviting federal workers to quit their jobs as part of a “deferred resignation program” that would pay them through September.
A group of unions (the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE); AFGE Local 3707; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); and the National Association of Government Employees) are suing Trump over that program.
“We are filing this lawsuit to stop the purge of qualified professionals from the federal government workforce. Not only are these actions illegal and a scam, but they are eroding the health and well-being of our communities,” said AFSCME President Lee Saunders in a statement. “These workers do everything from making sure families receive their Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits on time to protecting our drinking water and the food we eat to overseeing our national security. If this chaos goes unchecked, it will have devastating impacts on working people.”
“A climate of fear makes our workplaces and communities less safe. Mass deportation policies threaten civil liberties, encourage racial profiling, separate families and cause massive economic and emotional hardship.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that the administration is on the verge of implementing an executive order that would fire thousands of federal health workers and Trump has moved to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which employs 10,000 people.
He’s also submitted regulations to weaken federal worker protections, signed an executive order to reduce the size of the federal workforce, and fired a Democratic member of the federal employee appeals board.
The Economic Policy Institute’s Senior Policy Analyst Margaret Poydock told Truthout that these moves are “aimed at gutting the federal workforce and politicizing the career civil service.”
NLRB Immobilized
Labor advocates had anticipated Trump would revamp the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to suit his administration’s corporate agenda, but how it would unfold when he took office had remained unclear.
He fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo right away, which was expected. However rather than going through the usual steps of appointing a partisan majority, he also fired Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the board. The move is unprecedented in addition to being against the law, and Wilcox said she is “pursuing all legal avenues to challenge [her] removal.” On February 1, Trump fired Abruzzo’s successor, Acting General Counsel Jessica Rutter.
The firings reduced the board to just two members, which means that, like the EEOC, the board lacks a quorum and cannot issue any decisions or regulations. This allows companies to ignore labor law by dragging out cases in which a board ruling is needed.
Employers are already using the development to their advantage. After Whole Foods workers voted to unionize in Philadelphia, the company asked the NLRB to overturn the victory. “In the absence of a Board quorum, the Regional Director lacks statutory authority to investigate objections or certify the results, or otherwise engage in representation case procedures, including investigating objections or conducting the objections process,” reads the filing.
At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern points out that the goal of these firings may extend beyond impeding another federal agency.
A depleted NLRB sets the stage for Trump to terminate the 1935 precedent Humphrey’s Executor, a decision that allowed Congress to protect independent agencies from partisan interference and prohibited the president from removing members of such agencies. The GOP-controlled Supreme Court has essentially been circling the decision in recent years, expanding the president’s power to fire regulators, but so far that precedent has only applied to multimember commissions.
“If the Supreme Court does scrap Humphrey’s, it will probably unleash a spate of firings across other independent agencies,” writes Stern.
Jack Goldsmith, who ran the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, told The New York Times that the Trump administration might have made the moves in hopes of igniting legal challenges.
“On one level, this seems designed to invite courts to push back because much of it is illegal and the overall message is a boundless view of executive power,” said Goldsmith. “But really, they are clearly setting up test cases.”
Destroying the NLRB has been a long-time goal of billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk. In January 2024, Musk’s SpaceX company launched a lawsuit against the board after it accused the GOP megadonor of illegally firing workers. In November 2024, SpaceX and Amazon entered the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to argue that the NLRB is unconstitutional.
Crackdown on Immigrant Workers
In addition to heightening Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, the Trump administration has also taken legislative steps to punish immigrants. In January, Trump signed the Laken Riley Act, which found bipartisan support in the House weeks before he took office and in the Senate just hours after Joe Biden left. Framed by lawmakers as a bill aimed at protecting people from violence, the bill allows states to weaponize the law against the most vulnerable members of communities. With its passage, enforcement officers are allowed to indefinitely detain immigrants without bail, just for being accused of nonviolent, low-level crimes.
“A climate of fear makes our workplaces and communities less safe. Mass deportation policies threaten civil liberties, encourage racial profiling, separate families and cause massive economic and emotional hardship for millions of working people across the country,” read a statement from the AFL-CIO from a recent Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing. “The terror instilled by raids and targeting means that fewer people report crimes, visit a doctor, or send their kids to school — all of which undermines the health, wellbeing and safety of our communities.”
Fighting Back
As seen during the first Trump administration, many opponents will attempt to counter his political agenda in courts and in the halls of Congress. However, myriad legal challenges did not stop Trump from retaking power, and many perceive the Democratic response to the administration’s overreach as inadequate.
Some of the most crucial battles will take place in the workplace and on the streets.
Recent examples of this disconnect include the Democrats’ failure to extend former NLRB Chair Lauren McFerran’s term, their insistence on launching task forces as opposed to actual plans and Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s claim that the party lacks the leverage to stop Trump.
The work of progressive lawmakers and the work of attorneys will no doubt be important in the coming years, but some of the most crucial battles will take place in the workplace and on the streets. Direct action and coordinated pressure are already having an impact.
In Chicago, the immigrant rights movement launched education campaigns to counter the imminent ICE raids.
“The city’s vast networks of workers’ centers, unions, and community organizations have spent months preparing, disbursing flyers and cards, and sending the message to residents: Don’t talk to ICE,” Sarah Lazare and Rebecca Burns explained in an In These Times article. “The two-hour training at Arise Chicago’s offices yesterday night was the organization’s sixth in-house training that month, and just one of numerous actions taking place across the city to defend immigrant residents.”
Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan has openly complained that such education is impeding ICE from deporting people. “Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult,” he recently told CNN. “For instance, Chicago … they’ve been educated on how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE.”
After labor reporter Kim Kelly revealed that Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was planning to access the internal systems of the Department of Labor, hundreds of workers showed up outside the Frances Perkins Building to protest the move. “This is about our health,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told the crowd. “This is about our safety. This is about our jobs,” she declared. “Mine workers, construction workers, laborers, nurses — all are protected by DOL [Department of Labor]. And because of the people in this building, we can stand up.”
On the same day, a coalition of unions filed a lawsuit aimed at blocking Musk’s team from accessing Department of Labor files.
In response to the backlash, Musk’s “kickoff meeting” at the Department of Labor was reportedly moved from an in-person event to a virtual one, proof that any form of backlash can potentially impede the administration’s designs.
A recent Washington Post article details how some federal employees are engaging in workplace resistance to fight back, which includes workers creating an encrypted chat to shield the administration from sensitive data and marking emails from Trump as spam — “just to piss them off.”
“The 2.3 million civilian federal workers have found themselves on the front lines of Trump’s war against the bureaucracy, and, in ways cosmetic and substantive, some are mounting a defense,” the article explains.
The last couple weeks have been a whirlwind, but the Trump administration is just starting to implement its policy agenda. The next four years will be filled with battles for the working class and it remains to be seen what form those will take.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Arria
From limits on heat exposure to overtime rules, states can fill in some gaps as Trump dismantles federal protections.
by Casey Quinlan
Truthout
February 9, 2025
The administration also signed an order barring transgender people from serving in the military, a move that could eject nearly 15,000 people over their identity; rescinded a Biden administration executive order that directed employers to strengthen protections for LGBTQ people; instructed federal workers to delete their pronouns from email signatures; and removed documents connected to LGBTQ protections from the EEOC website.
Gutting the Federal Workforce
The president has instituted a federal hiring freeze, mandated a return to the office for nearly every remote federal worker, and reclassified thousands of federal employees in order to make them easier to fire. He also sent out a government-wide email inviting federal workers to quit their jobs as part of a “deferred resignation program” that would pay them through September.
A group of unions (the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE); AFGE Local 3707; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); and the National Association of Government Employees) are suing Trump over that program.
“We are filing this lawsuit to stop the purge of qualified professionals from the federal government workforce. Not only are these actions illegal and a scam, but they are eroding the health and well-being of our communities,” said AFSCME President Lee Saunders in a statement. “These workers do everything from making sure families receive their Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits on time to protecting our drinking water and the food we eat to overseeing our national security. If this chaos goes unchecked, it will have devastating impacts on working people.”
“A climate of fear makes our workplaces and communities less safe. Mass deportation policies threaten civil liberties, encourage racial profiling, separate families and cause massive economic and emotional hardship.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that the administration is on the verge of implementing an executive order that would fire thousands of federal health workers and Trump has moved to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which employs 10,000 people.
He’s also submitted regulations to weaken federal worker protections, signed an executive order to reduce the size of the federal workforce, and fired a Democratic member of the federal employee appeals board.
The Economic Policy Institute’s Senior Policy Analyst Margaret Poydock told Truthout that these moves are “aimed at gutting the federal workforce and politicizing the career civil service.”
NLRB Immobilized
Labor advocates had anticipated Trump would revamp the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to suit his administration’s corporate agenda, but how it would unfold when he took office had remained unclear.
He fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo right away, which was expected. However rather than going through the usual steps of appointing a partisan majority, he also fired Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the board. The move is unprecedented in addition to being against the law, and Wilcox said she is “pursuing all legal avenues to challenge [her] removal.” On February 1, Trump fired Abruzzo’s successor, Acting General Counsel Jessica Rutter.
The firings reduced the board to just two members, which means that, like the EEOC, the board lacks a quorum and cannot issue any decisions or regulations. This allows companies to ignore labor law by dragging out cases in which a board ruling is needed.
Employers are already using the development to their advantage. After Whole Foods workers voted to unionize in Philadelphia, the company asked the NLRB to overturn the victory. “In the absence of a Board quorum, the Regional Director lacks statutory authority to investigate objections or certify the results, or otherwise engage in representation case procedures, including investigating objections or conducting the objections process,” reads the filing.
At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern points out that the goal of these firings may extend beyond impeding another federal agency.
A depleted NLRB sets the stage for Trump to terminate the 1935 precedent Humphrey’s Executor, a decision that allowed Congress to protect independent agencies from partisan interference and prohibited the president from removing members of such agencies. The GOP-controlled Supreme Court has essentially been circling the decision in recent years, expanding the president’s power to fire regulators, but so far that precedent has only applied to multimember commissions.
“If the Supreme Court does scrap Humphrey’s, it will probably unleash a spate of firings across other independent agencies,” writes Stern.
Jack Goldsmith, who ran the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, told The New York Times that the Trump administration might have made the moves in hopes of igniting legal challenges.
“On one level, this seems designed to invite courts to push back because much of it is illegal and the overall message is a boundless view of executive power,” said Goldsmith. “But really, they are clearly setting up test cases.”
Destroying the NLRB has been a long-time goal of billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk. In January 2024, Musk’s SpaceX company launched a lawsuit against the board after it accused the GOP megadonor of illegally firing workers. In November 2024, SpaceX and Amazon entered the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to argue that the NLRB is unconstitutional.
Crackdown on Immigrant Workers
In addition to heightening Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, the Trump administration has also taken legislative steps to punish immigrants. In January, Trump signed the Laken Riley Act, which found bipartisan support in the House weeks before he took office and in the Senate just hours after Joe Biden left. Framed by lawmakers as a bill aimed at protecting people from violence, the bill allows states to weaponize the law against the most vulnerable members of communities. With its passage, enforcement officers are allowed to indefinitely detain immigrants without bail, just for being accused of nonviolent, low-level crimes.
“A climate of fear makes our workplaces and communities less safe. Mass deportation policies threaten civil liberties, encourage racial profiling, separate families and cause massive economic and emotional hardship for millions of working people across the country,” read a statement from the AFL-CIO from a recent Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing. “The terror instilled by raids and targeting means that fewer people report crimes, visit a doctor, or send their kids to school — all of which undermines the health, wellbeing and safety of our communities.”
Fighting Back
As seen during the first Trump administration, many opponents will attempt to counter his political agenda in courts and in the halls of Congress. However, myriad legal challenges did not stop Trump from retaking power, and many perceive the Democratic response to the administration’s overreach as inadequate.
Some of the most crucial battles will take place in the workplace and on the streets.
Recent examples of this disconnect include the Democrats’ failure to extend former NLRB Chair Lauren McFerran’s term, their insistence on launching task forces as opposed to actual plans and Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s claim that the party lacks the leverage to stop Trump.
The work of progressive lawmakers and the work of attorneys will no doubt be important in the coming years, but some of the most crucial battles will take place in the workplace and on the streets. Direct action and coordinated pressure are already having an impact.
In Chicago, the immigrant rights movement launched education campaigns to counter the imminent ICE raids.
“The city’s vast networks of workers’ centers, unions, and community organizations have spent months preparing, disbursing flyers and cards, and sending the message to residents: Don’t talk to ICE,” Sarah Lazare and Rebecca Burns explained in an In These Times article. “The two-hour training at Arise Chicago’s offices yesterday night was the organization’s sixth in-house training that month, and just one of numerous actions taking place across the city to defend immigrant residents.”
Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan has openly complained that such education is impeding ICE from deporting people. “Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult,” he recently told CNN. “For instance, Chicago … they’ve been educated on how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE.”
After labor reporter Kim Kelly revealed that Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was planning to access the internal systems of the Department of Labor, hundreds of workers showed up outside the Frances Perkins Building to protest the move. “This is about our health,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told the crowd. “This is about our safety. This is about our jobs,” she declared. “Mine workers, construction workers, laborers, nurses — all are protected by DOL [Department of Labor]. And because of the people in this building, we can stand up.”
On the same day, a coalition of unions filed a lawsuit aimed at blocking Musk’s team from accessing Department of Labor files.
In response to the backlash, Musk’s “kickoff meeting” at the Department of Labor was reportedly moved from an in-person event to a virtual one, proof that any form of backlash can potentially impede the administration’s designs.
A recent Washington Post article details how some federal employees are engaging in workplace resistance to fight back, which includes workers creating an encrypted chat to shield the administration from sensitive data and marking emails from Trump as spam — “just to piss them off.”
“The 2.3 million civilian federal workers have found themselves on the front lines of Trump’s war against the bureaucracy, and, in ways cosmetic and substantive, some are mounting a defense,” the article explains.
The last couple weeks have been a whirlwind, but the Trump administration is just starting to implement its policy agenda. The next four years will be filled with battles for the working class and it remains to be seen what form those will take.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Arria
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/16/trump-anti-worker-actions-unions
Trump administration
Trump vowed to champion US workers - the reality has been a relentless assault
President has begun slashing federal workforce while hobbling labor watchdogs NLRB and EEOC
by Steven Greenhouse
16 February 2025
The Guardian (UK)
As a presidential candidate last fall, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to battle for US workers, but ever since he returned to the White House, he has taken a surprisingly large number of anti-worker actions, labor experts say. Some of those moves, among them hobbling the National Labor Relations Board, will help Trump’s billionaire business friends, most notably Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
In his first few weeks back in office, Trump fired the acting chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), leaving the US’s top labor watchdog without a quorum to enforce laws that protect workers’ right to unionize. Trump has designated Musk, a vehemently anti-union billionaire, to launch an all-out war against the federal bureaucracy and workforce, and Trump and Musk have essentially treated the country’s 2 million-plus federal employees as if they were disposable.
Not stopping there, Trump fired two members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), leaving it without a quorum to carry out its mission of fighting against discrimination. In his crusade to downsize the government and demolish the “deep state”, Trump and his administration have fired thousands of federal employees – moves that union officials say have violated laws and rules that require due process and a finding of poor performance before workers can be dismissed.
“Donald Trump is showing that his promises to be a champion of workers are hollow,” said Judy Conti, government affairs director of the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group. “He surrounds himself with people who are anti-worker. He has a history of being anti-worker, but he tries to put a nice face on it. He says he’s a champion of workers. He’s just not.”
What does Elon Musk believe?
Read more
In a move that many federal workers found distasteful, Trump asked them to snitch on each other, to inform on co-workers engaged in diversity, equity and inclusion activities. The Trump administration further angered federal employees, as well as the labor movement, by announcing that it would nullify contracts reached with federal employee unions in the final weeks of the Biden administration.
Last month, just hours after an American Airlines jet collided with an army helicopter over Washington DC, killing 67 people, Trump dissed and angered Federal Aviation Administration employees, when he denounced diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies as fostering incompetence and suggesting that many FAA employees were unqualified. In another move upsetting worker advocates, Trump named Russell Vought, one of the architects of the controversial rightwing blueprint Project 2025, to run the White House budget office. Project 2025 is brimming with anti-worker recommendations, among them abolishing all government employee unions across the US.
“Trump has already shown that he’s not a friend of working people,” Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the country’s main union federation, said in an interview. “Project 2025 is playing out exactly as we feared, and America’s workers are right at the heart of those attacks.”
One Trump move that particularly upset labor leaders was his order to fire Gwynne Wilcox, the NLRB’s acting chair and a Democrat, even though her term ran until 2026 and even though the labor board is an independent agency. That left the five-member board with just two positions filled and thus without a quorum to make decisions (although its regional offices can still operate).
Calling her dismissal “unprecedented” and a “blatant violation” of the law, Wilcox is suing Trump and asking to be reinstated. “He does not have the authority to remove a board member unless they have engaged in neglect of duty or malfeasance,” Wilcox said in an interview. She noted that Trump never gave any reasons for firing her and failed to give advance notice or allow for a hearing.
“Their practical point was to prevent any work from being done,” Wilcox said. “It’s counter to what the agency is supposed to do, which is to protect the rights of working people and enforce the law.”
In defending that firing, the Trump administration asserted that Trump had the power to dismiss any executive branch employee he wishes. That claim is expected to be litigated all the way to the supreme court.
The AFL-CIO’s Shuler said: “The illegal firing of Gwynne Wilcox – we’re fighting that tooth and nail. It did exactly what Trump wanted to do, which was stymie the one agency that workers rely on when they’re in an organizing drive and taking risks and getting fired. They no longer have the board they need to protect them.” Ben Sachs, a Harvard labor law professor, added: “If you believe in unions and in workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively, then dismantling the NLRB is not the way to show one’s support for workers.”
Musk’s company SpaceX – which the NLRB has accused of firing several workers illegally – has brought suit in federal court to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional. Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, has brought a similar lawsuit after NLRB officials found that Amazon broke the law numerous times in fighting against unionization.
“We know the corporations that Musk and Bezos run have expressed a clear interest in shutting down the NLRB and have deployed teams of lawyers to accomplish that,” Sachs said. “Now they’ve got their way, at least temporarily.” If federal courts order Wilcox’s reinstatement, the NLRB would again have a quorum, enabling it to operate.
Trump also fired two EEOC commissioners, Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels, leaving it too without a quorum. He also fired members of two boards that hear cases in which federal employees assert they have been improperly fired or treated: the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
“All of these are agencies where workers who believe their rights have been violated can go to get remedies,” said Conti of the National Employment Law Project. “They’re essentially freezing the ability of these boards to remedy workers’ problems.”
Hundreds protest against the Trump administration’s planned closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington DC. Photograph: Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock
Mark Gaston Pearce, executive director of the Workers’ Rights Institute at Georgetown University, said it was disturbing that Trump, instead of firing one of the NLRB’s two white members, fired Wilcox, the only African American woman to serve on the NLRB in its 90-year history. Pearce asserted that Trump’s and Musk’s firing of hundreds of federal workers involved in DEI programs was disproportionately hitting workers of color. “It’s all code for getting rid of people of color,” Pearce said.
An African American official who worked at the Department of Education for more than 15 years and who insisted on anonymity said she was recently put on paid administrative leave merely because she had once participated in a DEI training. She said she had no idea whether she would be reinstated. “They’re vilifying the civil service,” she said. “It feels like a betrayal.”
Linda Ward-Smith, president of an American Federation of Government Employees union local representing 4,000 Veterans Administration workers in Las Vegas, said many federal employees were disgusted with how they had been treated. “Workers are telling me it’s a hostile work environment due to all the emails they’re receiving” – including Musk’s “Fork in the Road” email to 2 million federal employees suggesting they take buyouts and messages saying the Trump administration wants loyal employees. “They’re scared,” she said. “They feel the sky is going to fall.”
Ward-Smith said Trump’s and Musk’s attacks on DEI were making many workers of color anxious and thinking of leaving their government jobs. Several African American and female workers said they felt even more unwelcome when Trump appoints people like Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter, to a top state department position even though Beattie once said: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
Conti defended the federal government’s longtime effort to promote workforce diversity. “It is to promote true, full meritocracy,” Conti said. “It is not about quotas. It is not about not hiring white people. It is about removing the barriers that people of color, women, LGBTQ and other disadvantaged people face to compete for jobs for which they are qualified.
“What people need to know,” Conti continued, “is this is not some sort of targeted campaign against employment practices that have gone too far. It is a broad-based campaign to roll back our country’s civil rights protections. Full stop.”
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