(Editorial, ASR 92, Summer 2025)
When the Nazis came for the communists, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.—Martin Niemöller (1946)
Project 2025, the neo-fascist agenda written for Donald Trump by the far-right Heritage Foundation, is now being executed. The Trump regime has begun kidnapping immigrant workers from the streets, workplaces and schools and sending them to concentration camps. Court rulings that Trump’s victims be given their Habeas Corpus due process rights have been ignored. Even the courts themselves aren’t safe. ICE, the paramilitary police force ordered to begin the process of ethnic cleansing of the United States, now lurks outside courtrooms to arrest immigrants who have been ordered to appear. If the judge objects to her courtroom being used as traps to round up immigrants, the judge herself has been arrested by the FBI.
To their credit, some union leaders have protested the abuses by ICE and FBI by joining picket lines around the dungeons. In April, North America’s Building Trades Unions President Sean McGarvey, and International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers President Michael Coleman demanded the return of union sheet metal worker Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador concentration camp. (He was sent to El Salvador in defiance of an immigration court order; he was returned several weeks after the Supreme Court ordered it, but instead of being released is now being held on human smuggling charges apparently fabricated to save face.) In June, David Huerta, California president of the Service Employees International Union, was beaten and arrested for protesting against mass arrests of immigrant workers (and at least one worker who is not an immigrant, having been born in the United States, but merely Latino) in Los Angeles. However, other powerful union leaders, who will go nameless, to their shame have remained silent about the mass arrests and deportations with delusional hopes that Trump might be appeased and leave them and their members alone, or perhaps that they might even benefit by removing immigrants and foreign labor (i.e. tariffs) from their competition.
So far, however, none of the unions have used their real power to halt Trump’s palace coup. The real power of unions and workers lies in strikes and workplace disruption. ICE and the FBI are not immune from economic direct action. Trump’s gestapo, to use Bonaparte’s words, “marches on its stomach.” Deliveries of needed food, equipment and other supplies could be stopped. The capitalists, like Musk, Thiel and other oligarchs, who support Trump could likewise be forced to withdraw their support by strikes and other protests. Already we have seen how much Musk’s Tesla holdings have crashed electric vehicle sales and his stock value due to numerous protests in the US and other countries. Certainly the economic pressure on Musk was an aggravating factor in the collapse of the Trump-Musk bromance.
The unions are vital to defeating fascism, but if union leaders are too stupid not to see what is ahead if Trump and his MAGA movement isn’t stopped, then union members and non-unionized workers must do what needs doing. Pressure from below must force union leaders to stand against authoritarianism. If the union leaders won’t be moved then rank-and-file organizations must be built to act without their blessing. Non-unionized workers shouldn’t wait on the unions either. Form solidarity committees, worker councils, community groups and grassroots organizations and join the protests.