SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
unions
Trump Set to Install Anti-Union Attack Dog as Director of Key Labor Office
One watchdog group warned that Elisabeth Messenger is "a real ideologue" whose selection underscores the Trump administration's hostility to organized labor.
Mar 04, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump is reportedly expected to pick the former head of an anti-union organization that supports so-called "right-to-work" laws to lead a key office within the Department of Labor, where the administration is working to gut enforcement efforts against lawbreaking employers.
Citing two unnamed sources, HuffPostreported Monday that Elisabeth Messenger, former CEO of Americans for Fair Treatment (AFFT), is set to become director of the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS), whose purpose is to promote "labor-management transparency by making available reports showing unions' financial condition and employers' expenditures for their activities in persuading workers during union organizing campaigns."
HuffPost noted that "as the head of OLMS, Messenger would be charged with making sure unions, as well as anti-union consultants, make lawful disclosures to the government about their work."
Bob Funk, director of the watchdog group LaborLab, told HuffPost that Messenger is "a real ideologue" and her selection signals that the Trump administration will likely "go after not just public-sector unions but worker centers, too."
The outlet observed that AFFT "promotes right-to-work laws and advises public-sector workers like teachers on how to opt out of paying union dues."
Elisabeth Messenger, former CEO of the anti-union group "Americans for Fair Treatment," will be tasked with making sure anti-union consultants disclose their work.
[image or embed]
— LaborLab (@laborlab.bsky.social) March 3, 2025 at 4:59 PM
After posturing as a champion of American workers on the campaign trail, Trump kicked off his second White House term with what one observer described as "rapid-fire anti-worker actions," including mass firings of federal employees and the termination of key labor officials.
One of the fired officials, former National Labor Relations Board Chair Gwynne Wilcox, is suing Trump in federal court arguing her termination was illegal.
News that Trump is poised to install Messenger at the helm of OLMS comes roughly two weeks after former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), the president's pick to lead the Labor Department, vowed during her Senate confirmation hearing to defend "right-to-work laws" and said she no longer supports pro-union legislation that would dramatically weaken them.
That legislation, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, is set to be reintroduced Tuesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a group of congressional Democrats, and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.).
Keep ReadingShow Less
Musk and DOGE Are Following the Big Tech Playbook: Use AI to Justify Mass Layoffs
The message these tactics send is clear: Decades of public service experience can be dismissed in minutes if an AI system suggests your role is redundant.
Feb 27, 2025
Earlier this month, software firm Workday announced that it would be laying off more than 1,700 workers—or about 8.5% of its workforce—to redirect investment toward artificial intelligence. The announcement was the latest in a series of mass layoffs that have put hundreds of thousands of workers at Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, and other tech companies out of work over the past several years. Google and Meta are among the tech giants that have cited the need to invest resources in AI development as the reason for cutting jobs. AI is also a part of the rationale behind the raft of mass federal employees layoffs.
Much of the narrative about AI and jobs has focused on the threat of automation: What can AI do as well as—or better than—humans? Research on AI-driven job displacement often focuses on forecasting which jobs or tasks machines could perform in the future, and then estimating how many workers might be displaced due to this automation. A report might tell us that 30% of work hours could be automated by 2030, or a study might predict that 5% of work tasks across the economy could be performed by AI in the next 10 years.
While automation is a risk that needs to be understood and taken seriously, this framing misses a key aspect of what's happening in the economy now. After many tech firms overhired during the pandemic, companies are cutting jobs and investing in AI not to directly replace workers with machines, but to signal to investors that they're focused on future growth and profitability.
Fortunately, workers and unions are fighting back, both against AI-driven job displacement in private industry and against DOGE's attempts to dismantle the public service.
Mass layoffs are nothing new. As Les Leopold argues in his book Wall Street's War on Workers, for decades corporations have carried out mass layoffs not out of fiscal desperation, but as part of a strategy to further enrich wealthy shareholders through stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts. But now we are seeing how AI hype has become the latest justification for firing workers en masse. Tech firms aren't waiting around to see what roles AI can and can't replace before laying workers off. Instead, they're slashing jobs and redirecting resources to AI initiatives because the mere promise of AI-driven efficiency is enough to excite investors and drive up stock prices.
This strategy creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where tech firms devalue human labor to make automation seem inevitable. By carrying out mass layoffs, tech firms signal to investors and workers themselves that workers are replaceable. By reinvesting those resources in AI, firms make it more likely that AI will eventually become capable enough to replace the workers they already decided to eliminate.
The strategy of hyping AI to justify mass layoffs is exemplified by Swedish tech firm Klarna. As Noam Scheiber reports in The New York Times, when the company laid off 700 customer service workers last year, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski didn't just announce the cuts—he celebrated them. In media appearances and investor calls, Siemiatkowski proudly predicted that the company's workforce would eventually shrink to less than half its size thanks to AI-enabled productivity gains. As Scheiber reports, Siemiatkowski may even have overstated Klarna's progress in automating jobs to try to make the company more appealing to investors. For example, while the CEO claimed that AI enabled the company to become so efficient that it halted all new hiring a year and a half ago, journalists have found that the company continues to post job listings for vacant positions. The Klarna example shows how, for some companies, automation isn't just about replacing workers with machines; it is about redefining human labor as a temporary necessity to be tolerated until AI makes it obsolete. Like many tech firms, Klarna is betting that by hyping AI's potential while disinvesting in workers, they can make their vision of an automated future into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) is now bringing the AI-fueled mass layoff strategy to the federal government. Through DOGE, Musk and his allies are experimenting with AI tools "to identify budget cuts and detect waste and abuse," in agencies like the Department of Education and the General Services Administration (GSA). Staffers report that DOGE aims to reduce GSA's budget by up to 50%. As The Washington Post reports, "DOGE associates have been feeding vast troves of government records and databases into artificial intelligence tools, looking for unwanted federal programs and trying to determine which human work can be replaced by AI, machine-learning tools, or even robots." In other words, Musk is exploring how he can use AI as justification for carrying out mass layoffs across the federal government. The message these tactics send is clear: Decades of public service experience can be dismissed in minutes if an AI system suggests your role is redundant.
The DOGE-led mass layoffs are part of a decades-long conservative project of shrinking the federal workforce and weakening the administrative state. But what's new is how AI hype, and the guise of Silicon Valley efficiency, is being used to add a veneer of technological inevitability to this political project. "The federal government is suddenly being run like an AI startup," writes Kyle Chayka in a recent piece in The New Yorker. When DOGE staffers cite AI assessments as justification for eliminating positions, they're following the same playbook as tech CEOs: using speculative claims about AI capabilities to make workforce reduction seem like an unavoidable consequence of progress rather than a deliberate choice. DOGE's promises of AI-driven efficiency mask the reality that many government functions still require human judgment, institutional knowledge, and public service experience that no algorithm can replace. This combination of hostile management and AI hype isn't just about cutting costs—it's about redefining public service as something that can be evaluated by an algorithm and eliminated at the whims of a tech oligarch.
Fortunately, workers and unions are fighting back, both against AI-driven job displacement in private industry and against DOGE's attempts to dismantle the public service.
Workers are successfully using collective action to establish guardrails around AI usage and ensure technology serves rather than replaces human labor. The nearly five-month strike by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) in 2023 was motivated in large part by concerns that Hollywood studios would seek to use AI in ways that undermine workers or replace them altogether. SAG-AFTRA and WGA eventually won contracts that established frameworks for how studios can and cannot use AI during the production process, ensuring that AI cannot replace human writers and actors without their consent and fair compensation. As labor journalist Alex Press reports, similar fights have played out across workplaces in the hospitality, tech, and logistics industries. Through effective strikes and collective bargaining, workers can influence how AI is implemented in the workplace, and secure protections against mass layoffs.
Unions representing federal employees are also mounting a host of legal challenges to protect workers and preserve government services. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and several other unions filed suit to block what it called "arbitrary and capricious" job cuts laid out in the Trump administration's federal worker buyout program. Meanwhile, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has filed a lawsuit challenging Trump's directive to halt the bureau's operations, which the union alleges violates the constitutional separation of powers. While not directly a response to DOGE's use of AI, the lawsuits show how unions are taking action to oppose efforts to weaken federal agencies and devalue the work of career civil servants. As DOGE looks to use AI to justify mass layoffs, these lawsuits could establish important legal precedents to help protect workers from arbitrary dismissal based on algorithmic assessments.
Recent job cuts in the tech sector and in the federal government show how AI hype is being used to justify mass layoffs. Through collective action, workers are showing that AI's impact isn't predetermined by technology—it can be shaped through worker power.
This article first appeared on Power at Work and is republished here with permission.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Is Following the Project 2025 Playbook to Destroy Workers’ Rights
The massive curbs on workers’ rights that have occurred during the first month of the Trump administration signal it’s likely that plenty more will follow during his tenure in office.
Feb 23, 2025
Only a month into his second term as president, Donald Trump is well underway toward destroying crucial rights of American workers.
Currently, the best known of these threatened rights is probably job security, for the sudden onset of Trump’s mass, indiscriminate firing of more than 200,000 federal government workers has sparked a furor. Employed by the Departments of Education and Veterans Affairs, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Forest Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other vital U.S. agencies, these workers appear to have been simply tossed out of their jobs without honoring the legal requirement of due process, including performance-based evaluations.
Trump claimed that the mass firings were necessary to save money and make the government more efficient. But the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley, retorted that the firings were really “about power,” with Trump “gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.”
Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers’ rights, we should expect Trump’s future implementation of Project 2025’s recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their unions.
In addition, on January 31, Trump announced plans to nullify contracts recently negotiated and signed with the labor unions representing federal workers. Justifying this action, the president said that the contracts had been negotiated by former President Joe Biden “to harm my administration.”
Trump selected an appropriate figure to undermine workers’ rights when he appointed Elon Musk as the head of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and Trump’s largest campaign contributor, was well known as rabidly anti-labor, and had repeatedly clashed with workers at the giant companies he owned, among them Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter). Indeed, by January 2025, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had 24 open investigations into labor law violations by these three firms, including alleged surveillance of employees at Twitter and interference with union organizing at Tesla. In turn, a day after the NLRB accused Musk’s SpaceX company of retaliating against workers who had dared to criticize his employment practices, SpaceX filed a lawsuit to have the NLRB, established by Congress in 1935, declared unconstitutional and terminated.
Not surprisingly, Trump moved quickly to paralyze the activities of the NLRB, a federal agency created to guarantee American workers’ right to union representation. By firing the acting NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, long before her term of office ended in 2026, Trump not only acted illegally, but left the NLRB without the quorum necessary to operate, thus shutting it down.
“We’re fighting that tooth and nail,” declared AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler. The firing of Wilcox “did exactly what Trump wanted to do, which was to stymie the one agency that workers rely on when they’re in an organizing drive and taking risks and getting fired. They no longer have the board they need to protect them.”
As part of the same attack upon the NLRB, Trump fired Jennifer Abruzzo, the agency’s general counsel, and replaced her with a Republican loyalist. During her tenure, Abruzzo had issued a series of memos that prohibited common anti-labor practices by corporations. These memos banned abusive electronic monitoring and surveillance of workers on the job, captive audience meetings (in which workers were forced to listen to anti-union pep talks), and severance agreements with overly broad non-disparagement and confidentiality sections (which prevented former workers from discussing workplace issues). These pro-worker directives and more were quickly reversed by her Republican successor at the NLRB.
The Trump administration also launched a devastating assault on another federal agency established to safeguard workers’ rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to bar workplace discrimination, the EEOC, too, lost the ability to continue operations when Trump quickly fired two of its commissioners. An administration official maintained that the two dismissed EEOC commissioners were “far-left appointees with radical records.”
These challenges to the independence and functioning of both agencies are quite extraordinary. The presidential removal of an NLRB board member and of two EEOC commissioners is unprecedented, for none have ever been fired before in the long histories of both agencies. Moreover, by congressional statute, these are independent federal entities, ostensibly shielded from presidential interference. And now, thanks to this interference, they are unable to operate.
As these and other curbs on workers’ rights have all occurred during the first month of the Trump administration, it’s likely that plenty more will follow during his tenure in office. And there are numerous indications that that they will.
After all, the playbook for much of what the Trump administration has done so far―such as its mass firing of federal workers―is Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-developed blueprint for Trump’s second term, and one of its key architects is Russell Vought, appointed by Trump as the new White House budget director. As an Associated Press dispatch notes, this office is “one of the most influential positions in the federal government,” acting “as a nerve center for the White House, developing its budget, policy priorities, and agency rule-making.”
Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers’ rights, we should expect Trump’s future implementation of Project 2025’s recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their unions. These include banning public employee unions, as well as empowering the states to ban private sector unions and ignore federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor laws.
All told, these developments are forcing American workers to address the old union question: “Which Side Are You On?”.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular