Above photo: Workers march on May Day in Philadelphia, May 1, 2025.Joe Piette / WW.
It has been a month-long whirlwind of fascistic maneuvers by President Donald Trump’s administration. First came the firing of Erika McEntarfer as director of the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Aug. 1. Trump then immediately nominated Project 2025’s Heritage Foundation chief economist E.J. Antoni as her replacement. Next came the staging of hundreds of National Guard troops in the streets of Washington, D.C.
All of this intensifies the war against workers and oppressed peoples coast to coast.
McEntarger’s firing immediately followed the BLS’s monthly “jobs report,” which claimed that from May through July 2025, only 73,000 jobs had been created in the world’s largest capitalist economy. While some commentators have called the appointment of ultraright economist Antoni a “coverup,” “silencing the truth,” “groundless,” “politicizing” and “detrimental to BLS credibility,” in truth the BLS has been a tool wielded by the ruling capitalist class since its inception in 1884 during a wave of strikes by railroad workers and mass national labor actions demanding an 8-hour work day.
In fact, BLS monthly jobs reports have historically been analyzed by Marxists and labor organizations as grossly underestimating unemployment figures. (workers.org/2019/05/42267/) Based on BLS reports, corporate bosses, bankers and their government agencies make decisions about whether to raise or lower wages and interest rates, hire or lay off workers and legislate working conditions to benefit their profit-gambling speculators on Wall Street.
Trump’s machinations at the BLS are part and parcel of the ruling class’s now more open, ideological and coordinated war to replace millions of workers with artificial intelligence (AI) and smash what remains of labor unions in the U.S. workforce, especially among the largest sector of federal workers. Compared to the U.S. private sector’s less than 6% unionization, over 1 million federal workers — a significant portion Black, Latine and Indigenous — are unionized, amounting to over 50% of the federal workforce.
You’re fired!
According to an Aug. 22 article in the New York Times headlined “Year Will End With 300,000 Fewer Federal Workers, Trump Official Says,” the firings and layoffs of federal workers — initiated by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with a shock-and-awe campaign of mass firings in the spring — “amounts to the loss of about one in eight federal civilian workers and would be the largest single-year reduction since World War II.”
The DOGE attack was a green light to CEOs of private corporations to open fire on their workers. They have terminated the employment of nearly 1 million workers so far in 2025, the largest number since the 2020 job shutdowns at the beginning of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Corporations throwing workers into unemployment in 2025 are a who’s who of U.S.-based brand names — from Microsoft, Dell, Moderna, Alaska Air, Allianz Insurance, Intel and Chevron to Procter & Gamble, Chiquita, Target, Harvard, Duke and private universities too numerous to mention. (intellizence, Aug. 19)
In reality, the BLS’s Aug. 1 “jobs report” under the directorship of a Biden appointee claiming “73,000 jobs created” was itself a big capitalist lie — covering up historic job losses and increasing unemployment among every sector of the U.S. capitalist economy, except at companies directly producing killing machines in the military-industrial complex.
Your union’s busted!
On Aug. 6, fresh in the wake of McEntarfer’s ouster at BLS and a federal appeals court ruling, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) received notice from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ new bosses that they were unilaterally ripping up every page of AFGE’s labor agreement, first established in 1962 when the now 320,000 workers there won the right to collectively bargain.
As the shock was settling in at AFL-CIO headquarters in D.C. and labor councils and locals coast to coast, the new corporate leadership at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Aug. 8 awed the tens of thousands of workers there with the announcement that union contracts are also now null and void.
Justin Chen, president of AFGE Council 23, which represents about 8,000 workers at the EPA said: “This is the greatest attack on labor rights since the PATCO strike, when about 12,000 air traffic controllers walked out in 1981, and Ronald Reagan responded by firing them and dissolving the union. And this is quite a bit worse.”
Chen added, “We’re just the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the working class, essentially.” (The Guardian, Aug. 22)
Existential moment for unions
As labor unions prepare for traditional Labor Day actions, the U.S. labor movement faces an historical moment — an existential threat from fascist-minded administrators now entrenched with bipartisan Congressional confirmations in the White House, Congress, Supreme Court and their various agencies and state police forces. The dry runs at martial law, with federal and National Guard troops in the streets of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have been bolstered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s targeted arrests of labor leaders like Cata “Xóchitl” Santiago of Movimiento Cosecha and Service Employees Union California President David Huerta.
The AFL-CIO and all of its affiliated councils — now gearing up for their usual role of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars of workers’ dues to the Democratic Party cartel for 2026 mid-term elections and Labor Day rallies with their preferred candidates — need to take a lesson from their rank-and-file members who have been showing up in the streets by the millions for Palestine in cities coast to coast.
As Chris Smalls, a founder of the Amazon Labor Union — now Teamsters ALU-IBT Local 1 — and recent member of the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza put it in an Instagram post a few weeks ago, “America is overdue for a general strike!!”
Steve Gillis is a former elected president of United Steelworkers Local 8751 — the Boston School Bus Drivers Union (retired).
