On this edition of Your Call, we're discussing the state of the labor movement under the Trump administration.
The federal workforce has been hit hard. More than a million federal workers have lost their collective bargaining and union protections. Labor historian Joseph MCartin says it's the largest and most aggressive single act of union busting in US history.
According to the Economic Policy Institute's 100 days, 100 ways report, the administration has taken steps to make most US workers and their families substantially poorer in the coming years. Trump has rescinded an executive order that gave 390,000 low-wage federal contractors a living wage, terminated DOL grants that fight forced and child labor and promote workers’ rights, delayed the enforcement of a rule intended to protect coal miners from exposure to silica, and more.
Nationwide protests are planned for Labor Day.
Guests:
Joseph McCartin, professor of history and founding executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor & the Working Poor at Georgetown University, author of Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, and Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America, president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, and contributing editor to Labor: Studies in Working-Class History
John Logan, professor and department chair of Labor and Employment Studies at San Francisco State University, focuses on the anti-union industry and anti-union legislation in the US, and comparative labor issues, particularly how multinational companies treat employees and unions differently in the US compared to European countries, and writer on US and international labor issues
Victor Narro, lecturer in law at UCLA and project director for the UCLA Labor Center, nationally known expert on the workplace rights of immigrant workers who has worked with the Los Angeles Labor Movement on major immigrant worker organizing campaigns with janitors, hotel workers, laundry workers, sanitation workers, port truckers, and the CLEAN Carwash Campaign, and author of The Activist Spirit: Toward a Radical Solidarity
Resources:
Dissent by Joseph McCartin: Will Federal Workers Rediscover Their Militancy?
International Union Rights by John Logan: The Unravelling of American Labour Optimism (and how to get it back): Has Trump killed the union “moment” of the past few years?
Economic Policy Institute by John Logan: Corporate union busting in plain sight
The Conversation: Trump administration has proven no friend to organized labor, from attacking federal unions to paralyzing the National Labor Relations Board
The Guardian: CEO-to-worker pay gap surges to 632 to 1 at US’s lowest-paying large firms, study shows
The New York Times: Union Leaders Get Tough With Democrats as Members Drift Toward Trump
