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Trump claimed he was pro-worker. His new order shows how absurd that was

11 15
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If any workers are still holding on to the notion that Donald Trump is pro-worker or pro-union, his move last week to terminate union bargaining rights for 1 million federal workers should disabuse them of that notion. As a candidate Trump often wooed workers by promising to fight for them, but ever since he returned to the White House, he has taken dozens of anti-worker and anti-union actions.

In an unprecedented anti-union action last Thursday, the president moved to end collective bargaining for a million federal employees and scrap union contracts nearly that number, while attacking their unions as “hostile” merely because they were doing what unions are supposed to do: battling to save the jobs of tens of thousands of union members whom Trump and Elon Musk had summarily fired.

In an era when many workers are demanding respect, Trump keeps showing disrespect toward the country’s 2.3 million federal workers. He and Musk have cavalierly fired more than 50,000 federal employees, ignoring contractual protections saying they could only be terminated for poor performance. Then Trump blamed the victims, saying, without evidence: “Many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.” Trump views federal employees not as dedicated workers who serve the nation’s 340 million people, but as deplorables who work for the detested deep state.

Not stopping there, Trump has named several vehemently anti-union figures to be his right-hand men. Russell Vought, head of Trump’s office of management and budget, has shown true sadism toward workers. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video disclosed by ProPublica and the research group Documented. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they........

© The Guardian