Trump's Lawbreaking Also Aimed at Workers -- The American Prospect

[erronis]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-01-28-trumps-lawbreaking-also-aimed-at-workers/

Today on TAP: Neutering the NLRB and targeting janitors, even as his billionaire backers stomp on workers’ rights

President Trump’s current day of running amok, which began with unconstitutionally impounding federal grants and appropriations, as my colleague David Dayen has explained, has continued with his attacks on American workers. During the past 24 hours, he fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox and NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. Wilcox was fired illegally, despite Congress having ratified her appointment to a term that extends to 2028, in keeping with Trump’s campaign to negate congressionally enacted laws and appointments. Her firing—which Wilcox is contesting in court—also leaves the five-member Board with just two members, even as the Supreme Court has ruled that the Board needs at least three members to issue any rulings, including on illegal firings, union election certification challenges, citations of unfair labor practices, or anything else.

The simultaneous firing of Abruzzo, who’s been the most pro-worker federal official since New York Sen. Robert Wagner (who authored both the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act in 1935), means that the Board not only can’t rule on any employment issues but also that its local attorneys who investigate employee and employer complaints no longer have a senior counsel who sets their priorities and policy. In Wilcox’s and Abruzzo’s stead, we’re left with a labor law of the jungle, which enables employers to run as roughshod over their workers as their little pocketbooks desire.

Trump’s war on immigrants compounds this abuse. Last Friday, ICE agents showed up at a number of downtown San Francisco office buildings after hours, when janitors (members of SEIU Local 87) were engaged in their regular cleaning and maintenance tasks. In almost every major American city, a sizable share of the janitorial workforce is composed of immigrants, so this show of force is sure to compel workers to stop showing up to work and to engender fear among immigrants and their families, both documented and not. It also runs completely counter to virtually every city’s efforts to bring workers back to their downtowns, an effort upon which the newly elected, more-centrist-than-his-predecessor mayor of San Francisco has embarked. That mayor, Daniel Lurie, along with the city’s district attorney, police chief, county sheriff, and other public officials and community and labor leaders, is holding a press conference as we speak to reaffirm San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city and to make clear its determination to oppose Trump’s efforts to instill fear in its residents and disrupt both the city’s revitalization and workings of daily life that sustain it.

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Not only is Donald Trump determined to accelerate that decline, but his billionaire backers are accelerating it themselves. Elon Musk has declared he’s “opposed to the idea of unions,” and Amazon, where Jeff Bezos is board chair, just responded to the workers in one Quebec warehouse voting to unionize by having the company order the closure of every single warehouse in the province. (I know, that’s not in the United States, but it illustrates the depth of Bezos’s commitment to retaining autocratic control of his company.) Workers in a Philadelphia Whole Foods market voted overwhelmingly to go union yesterday (Amazon owns Whole Foods), but there’s no way Bezos will ever recognize their union and allow them to bargain with the company.

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[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. Why Trump's personnel purges are likely to end up in court

There are legal constraints in place that are designed to prevent many of the president's recent firings. So why is Trump making the moves anyway?
https://bsky.app/profile/rcooley123.bsky.social/post/3lgyhamz7cs2f

Link to tweet

Why Trump’s personnel purges are likely to end up in court

Late last week, Donald Trump fired as many as 17 inspectors general without cause. These government watchdogs are responsible for investigating internal wrongdoing, possible ethical…”

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trumps-personnel-purges-are-likely-end-court-rcna189850

The so-called “midnight massacre” was controversial for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that Trump’s move appears to be at odds with federal law. The New York Times report explained, “The firings defied a law that requires presidents to give Congress 30 days’ advance notice before removing any inspector general, along with reasons for the firing. Just two years ago, Congress strengthened that provision by requiring the notice to include a ‘substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for the removal.’”

Trump evidently didn’t care about the legal constraints....

As the week progressed, the list of firings grew. The Washington Post reported on the president firing “Democratic members of two independent federal commissions,” which represented “an extraordinary break from decades of legal precedent.”

On Monday night, he dismissed two of the three Democrats on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — Jocelyn Samuels and Charlotte Burrows, formerly the chair, the White House confirmed Tuesday. He also fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox, a Democrat, an NLRB spokesperson confirmed Tuesday. Trump also removed the EEOC’s general counsel, Karla Gilbride, who oversaw civil actions against employers on a range of issues, including discrimination claims from LGBTQ+ and pregnant workers. And he terminated Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB’s general counsel.

It might be tempting to think a new administration is going to make all kinds of personnel changes, so no one should be too surprised by widespread firings.....

There’s also a larger concern about whether the White House wants to do away with the very idea of independent commissions and boards, centralizing even more power and authority in the Oval Office.

But I'm also struck by the through-line: There are legal constraints in place that are designed to prevent many of these firings. The question is why the president appears indifferent to these limits

There will be some fun lawsuits to watch due to these illegal terminations

[erronis]

2. And as trump's exemplar Andrew Jackson purportedly said: "Now let him enforce it"

That may not have actually been uttered and recorded but the effect was the same.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Worcester-v-Georgia