September 1st will be the day that America has set aside to show our appreciation to the working people in our country who keep the food on our tables, the shelves stocked, gas in our automobiles, and all the necessary day-to-day needs that we sometimes take for granted. We all think it is a great accomplishment for someone to go to college and become a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or scientist. But it’s the blue-collar working people whom we often overlook who are the backbone of this country.
Unless you have ever worked a blue-collar job where you hit that time clock every day, you can’t understand how hard these folks work. I remember my Grandfather coming home from the coal mines covered in coal dust, carrying his lunch pail and sitting down on the porch for a quick glass of iced tea. My Mother worked in restaurants all of her life and came home in the evening, counting her tips. We had neighbors who worked in the cotton mills, and they would come in with white cotton in their hair. We can’t forget all the women who worked in those garment plants with no air conditioning and busted their butts to make production to get that extra dollar on their checks.
One saving grace for workers to have a voice in their workforce was the organization of collective bargaining through a Union. Not everyone is “pro-Union,” and that is understandable. In today’s workforce, with the Trump Administration pulling every underhanded trick in the book, what recourse do Jane and John Doe have in a right-to-work state like Alabama?
At every turn, Donald Trump has made increasing the power of corporations over working people his top priority. The list of the damage done to working people by the Trump Administration is long. Trump packed the courts with anti-labor judges who have made the entire public sector “right to work for less” in an attempt to financially weaken Unions. Trump stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointees who side with employers in contract disputes and support companies who delay and stall Union elections, misclassify workers to take away their freedom to join a Union, and silence workers.
Trump has restricted overtime pay, opposed wage increases, and gutted health and safety protections. He changed the rules about who qualifies for overtime pay, making more than 8 million workers ineligible and costing them over $1 billion per year in lost wages. Trump reduced the number of OSHA inspectors so that there are now fewer than at any time in history, and weakened penalties for companies that fail to report violations. He has threatened to veto legislation that would raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Trump’s former Secretary of Labor, Eugene Scalia, was an anti-worker, Union-busting corporate lawyer who aggressively defended Cablevision’s decision to fire 22 instead of supporting CWA’s bipartisan legislation to help save call center jobs. Trump pushed for a corporate tax cut bill that gives companies a 50% tax break on their foreign profits, making it financially rewarding for them to move our jobs overseas. He has broken his campaign promise to take on companies that move good jobs overseas. Instead, he’s given over $115 billion in Federal contracts to companies that are offshoring jobs.
During this last election, the Democrats all over this country warned about what was to come if Trump were elected. Project 2025 spelled out the agenda of this administration in clear form. This 920-page document, written by at least 140 Trump advisors and former members of the Trump administration, put in black and white what their intentions were. We, Democrats, broke it down for you on how this would affect working families.
Trump lied and denied that he was associated with Project 2025. Go back and read it, and you will see that this is his playbook. In spite of its claims of “putting American workers first,” the Trump administration has ended collective bargaining for 4 out of 5 Federal workers represented by Unions at more than a dozen Federal agencies. According to a Center for American Progress analysis of Federal employment data, the Trump administration ended collective bargaining rights for more than 1 million American workers, or nearly 1 out of every 15 workers nationwide covered by a Union contract, via an executive order issued on March 27, 2025, and a prior decision to end collective bargaining at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). According to Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartin, this order is “by far the largest single action of union-busting in American history.”
When Donald Trump nominated former U.S. Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer to serve as Secretary of Labor, a narrative emerged that Trump was breaking from Republican orthodoxy and choosing a Labor Department head who might actually be sympathetic to workers and their Unions. After all, as a member of the House, Chavez-DeRemer, an Oregon Republican, had been one of the few members of her party’s caucus to back pro-union legislation such as the Protecting the Right to Organize Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. She has proved to be just another puppet in the ring of the cult of Trump.
Ms. Chavez-DeRemer has weakened workers’ protections by rolling back numerous regulations aimed at protecting workers’ health, safety, and wages. She has supported the budget cuts, staff reductions, and elimination of programs to enforce labor laws that greatly affect women, minorities, and individuals with disabilities.
Ms. Chavez-DeRemer submitted a proposed budget to Congress that would slash her agency’s discretionary funding to $8.6 billion from $13.2 billion, and cut its workforce by nearly 4,000 full-time workers. Among the services to be eliminated would be the Job Corps, which assists low-income youth to complete their high school education and provides job training and placement. On July 1 came what could be the biggest blow. Chavez-DeRemer announced a plan to rescind 63 regulations that had been designed to help workers. With language that sounds cribbed from the MAGA playbook, she said her goal is to “eliminate unnecessary regulations that stifle growth and limit opportunity.”
What is the future for the American worker? Their future is our future. The hard-working Americans who provide the oil that keeps the wheels turning in our country are under attack by the Trump administration. Whether you support organized labor or not, this is a concern that should be on all of our minds. Without a Union, where does the worker have a voice, job protection, benefits, fair wages, healthcare, and safe working conditions? If they depend on the Department of Labor, they are looking down a rabbit hole. Happy Labor Day, America!
Lynda Kirkpatrick