This Year’s Labor Day Challenge: Stand up as “Bulwarks of Democracy”
Historians and social philosophers have often asserted that labor unions and collective bargaining are “bulwarks of democracy.”
That is why unions and free collective bargaining are among the first democratic institutions targeted for attack by totalitarian leaders. This was true of Mussolini as he brought Fascism to Italy, Hitler as he gained control in Germany, and continues to be true of longstanding communist regimes in Russia and China.
So we should not be surprised that attacks on unions and collective bargaining, as well as on long-accepted human resource management practices, are a central focus of Donald Trump’s effort to destroy America’s democracy.
One of his first executive orders eliminated collective bargaining rights for Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) employees, arguing that collective bargaining is, somehow, “a threat to national security.” More recently, he issued an executive order cancelling contracts for over 400,000 other federal employees in the Environmental Protection Agency, Treasury, and several other departments using the same dubious claim.
He shut down the National Labor Relations Board’s ability to enforce our nation’s labor law by firing its chair and eliminating the quorum needed to make decisions. He decimated the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the nation’s agency responsible for helping labor and management reach agreements without strikes, resolving those that occur, and facilitating labor-management cooperation initiatives. His guidebook, Project 2025, suggests much more damage may be coming, given its stated goals to eliminate collective bargaining rights for all state and local government employees and make it harder for private sector workers to organize a union.
But the attacks go even further to violate well-established civil service rules and human resource management practices. He fired federal workers without any semblance of just cause. He rescinded the Executive Order in place since 1965 that held firms with federal contracts accountable for taking affirmative actions to ensure their workforce reflects the demographics of their communities and labor markets.
More broadly his attacks on DEI strike at the heart of principles that human resource management professionals have lauded as necessary for attracting and retaining the talent employers need to compete for today’s diverse workforce.
Unions are doing their best to fight these attacks by challenging them in the courts. This is a necessary defensive response, but it is slow and faces highly uncertain outcomes, especially given that the Supreme Court, led by the Chief Justice, has emboldened Trump by arguing the Constitution calls for a “vigorous and energetic” president who can carry out the duties of that office “without undue caution.”
Strong defensive actions to block these attacks are only the first step. American workers need leaders—in unions and in companies—to go on the offense.
Many workers are already doing so. Across the country, we see workers demanding a greater and stronger voice at work.
For example, a new national survey, the American Job Quality Survey, finds that a majority of workers in the US want a stronger voice at work than they currently experience on their jobs. Fully 69 percent of workers say they have less of a voice than they think they should have on wages and benefits and 55 percent say the same thing with respect to how new technologies like AI are affecting their jobs.
Across the country workers are striking or bargaining hard like the baristas at Starbucks, mechanics who build military planes at Boeing, and the food and beverage workers at Fenway Park, to gain a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work today and to ensure they will have the training and opportunities to share in the benefits that new technologies could produce for their employers and for the quality of their jobs.
So today, labor’s clarion call of solidarity forever must be applied to solidarity now and for all who work.
Leaders in organized labor and in management who profess to stand for the principles of fair employment and human resource practices need to lead the way.
Unions can do so by using collective bargaining to reinforce existing contract provisions or add new ones to promote diversity and equity in organizations. These clauses have been growing in number across industries as diverse as health care, education, construction, and retail. Expand them.
Do the same for demonstrating how collective bargaining can give companies and workers a step up in the effective use of AI by bringing workers’ voices and knowledge of their work into the earliest stages of technology development and design.
Labor and management need to reach agreement on a new set of wage norms that close the wage gap workers are protesting.
Construction unions and contractors can negotiate continued support and use of project labor agreements to ensure labor-management cooperation and access of women and minority to these good jobs.
And, our leading human resource management employment professional associations such as the National Academy of Human Resources(NAHR), the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) and the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA), can urge its members to stand up and recommit to state-of-the-art employment practices for attracting and retaining a diverse workforce.
If labor and management take both defensive and offensive actions, future historians will applaud them for living up to their reputation for being bulwarks of democracy in this time of crisis.
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