The opening salvos of the second Trump administration have made clear that his administration aims to declare war on the labor movement and the working class. On January 28, President Trump fired two key National Labor Relations Board figures appointed by President Biden, Gwynne Wilcox and Jennifer Abruzzo. On February 19th, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) evicted the NLRB’s Buffalo office and cancelled their 5-year lease with no warning. On March 27th, Trump issued an executive order ending collective bargaining for federal labor unions, and a federal appeals court upheld this order on May 19th. These actions likely presage a wider legal challenge to the existence of the National Labor Relations Board and, possibly, a wholesale repeal of the National Labor Relations Act.
The mainstream labor movement is either panicking or lining up to bend the knee to the new president. The NLRA underpins the legal existence, structure, and actions of virtually all unions in the United States. It is a key piece in the legal structure of labor relations, while the NLRB acts as a kind of referee between workers, unions, and employers. If the NLRA and NLRB disappear, the legal basis of most unions also evaporates, and the strategy of virtually all mainstream unionism is suddenly called into question. Much of the political left is also distraught about these developments after spending much of the past 4 years praising recent NLRB rulings as “progressive” elements of the Biden administration. If the legal basis of union organizing is removed, business unions will be confronted with an existential crisis that very few seem ready for: abandonment of legalistic, inside-baseball labor relations.
Of course, these developments raise several questions and observations about the business unions. The first is: what the hell did they expect? The NLRB is a body made up of presidential appointees who can be chosen and fired by the president more or less at will. As such, getting “good” people on the Board to make “favorable” rulings depends entirely on the electoral fortunes of a favored candidate or party (generally being the Democratic Party). Over the past 90 years of the NLRA, this has conditioned the labor movement into a meek, neutered shadow of what it once was; unions are now more likely to beg for scraps from the table of the political parties than to demand even the reformist position of a seat at the table.
It is a fantasy to assume, even if there are a few years when the government is slightly more friendly to unions, that this environment will last forever, particularly when the labor movement is historically weak and economic conditions are rapidly worsening for most workers. Functionally, this means that business unions can only campaign for Democrats during Republican administrations and can only organize or take action during Democratic administrations, while hoping that the Democrats will keep their promises, pretty please. And for what? Supposedly the “most pro-union President ever” Joe Biden himself intervened to stop major strikes several times during his term from 2021-2024, notably forcing a raw deal on railroaders just before Christmas in 2022 to avoid a disruptive strike and “protect the post-COVID economic recovery.” A Merry Christmas indeed.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien drew widespread controversy in 2024 for cozying up with Trump, which, while reprehensible, only holds the mirror up to the AFL-CIO’s tight relationship to the Democrats, especially at a time when the Biden administration was actively collaborating with Israel’s genocidal Gaza campaign.
Ultimately, whether the mainstream unions cozy up to one party, the other, or both, the dynamic (and end result) is the same: insider horse trading in smoky rooms while workers’ power languishes, imperialist war tears apart families abroad, and deindustrialization continues at home. This is not a failure of political leadership on the part of unions; it is the inevitable result of the legal structure and class compromise of the NLRA. The entire point of the Act is to contain and destroy worker power over the economy, made explicit in its opening clause.
As many other IWW members have argued in the Industrial Worker and elsewhere so many times before, the solution to this problem is not to double down on ineffective bureaucratic methods. Invariably, these strategies (sectoral bargaining, state level joint labor councils, labor-management round tables, etc.) are motes of dust in the firestorm of modern global capitalism. They reproduce the mediocre parts of the NLRA at best and act as an obstacle to building democratic worker power at worst.
The only solutions available to us are direct worker power and class struggle. Capitalists and other ruling class goons will only give us what we want when we stop production and inflict economic pain on them; lawsuits and shame campaigns will never get major wins for workers in a period characterized by declining marginal profit rates and increasing elite capture of the regulatory and social welfare state. The effectiveness of bureaucratic strategies versus class struggle are evident at the large scale social and economic conditions today, but comparing two recent labor struggles with drastically different tactics and results underline the point more boldly.
The Starbucks Workers United campaign has relied since its beginnings in 2021 on the swift deployment of NLRB certification elections at individual cafes. A media air war has played out as SWU has tried to keep the ball rolling and reach a critical mass of the workforce to get a strong bargaining position for contract negotiations. Instead of using concerted direct action to force smaller wins and build up to larger concessions, SWU has relied on symbolic actions like corporate shaming, one-day “strikes” at select cafes, and so on. Contract bargaining has been stalled and dragged out for years with no real economic agreements reached and no end in sight. Starbucks, in 2024, won a Supreme Court case (Starbucks v. McKinney) challenging a fundamental part of NLRB’s legal basis. Several other major companies are conducting similar cases in an effort to undermine the NLRB framework. If this effort proves successful, SWU’s entire playbook – and indeed that of most of the labor movement – will be snatched and burned in front of them and years of time for thousands of members will have been wasted for nothing. I would argue, however, that it has already been wasted.
Contrast this with the 2024 Boeing Machinist strike. This struggle stands out in that the Boeing Machinists are historically very strike-ready and exercise that power within the extent possible under the NLRA. The workers walked off the job in September 2024 after a few years of agitating over declining working conditions, stagnant pay, safety, and poor quality products that spectacularly killed several hundred passengers in the previous decade. The all-out strike of about 40,000 workers paralyzed the company and ultimately cost management several billion dollars; the union accepted a tough compromise contract on a narrow approval margin after a few weeks on the line, with concessions including a 40 percent pay raise.
While the Boeing deal was not everything the workers wanted, it provides a sharp contrast to the strategy of avoiding real action by SWU. Had SWU spent 3-4 years preparing thousands of workers to strike for better pay and benefits like the Machinists, they would be in a far better position today to continue fighting struggles. But without any workers experienced in direct class struggle against the boss and a legal structure looking increasingly rickety, they are increasingly looking doomed. And from the point of view of this Wobbly, asking workers to put their jobs and livelihoods at risk for a project doomed from the start is political suicide. That is hundreds of thousands of hours of collective volunteer time from the membership, millions of dollars of dues, and god knows how much ink spilled into a black hole that members have not gotten much out of. At least the Machinists got to go home for the holiday break and buy their kids a nice Christmas present with a 40 percent pay bump. And a new generation of young Machinists see what they can do by stopping work.
Moving forward, instead of cultivating legal cases and lawyers, we must cultivate workers to organize, lead, and fight struggles directly against the employer. Instead of raising money to pay for an army of paid professional staff, we must be raising money to fight strikes and bail hardened union leaders out of jail. Instead of cultivating fellow workers to be petty bureaucrats filing grievances up the chain to lawyers and the NLRB, we must train them to be fighting workers who practice solidarity with all workers of the world by organizing direct class conflict.
It is the historic mission of the working class to take up the mantle of class struggle, seize the means of production, and establish a workers society free of the exploitation of capital. Those goals are lofty, but they can be accomplished only by the self-activity of workers exercising our power over the job. The bourgeoisie will fight us every single step of the way. It is time to stop pretending we can work with them and start building, relentlessly, the class struggle.