Workers and Unions Need to Stand Up to Trump

(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. Continue reading

Flirting with Trump

from ASR 91 (Winter 2025)

Several business unions are flirting with the incoming Trump administration, hoping that they can gain special treatment through obsequious flattery and cash payments. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien went so far as to speak at the Republican National Convention and donate union dues money to the Trumpsters. Now he claims this strategy has paid off with the appointment of a Teamsters-backed candidate for Secretary of Labor, former Republican congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer – who made occasional statements of support for workers during her single term. (Her voting record tells a rather different story.) Continue reading