Labor Day 2022 seemed to me “the most promising moment for unions in several decades.” That year, young workers were trying to organize new unions from coast to coast, and labor unions enjoyed over 70 percent popularity for the first time in 60 years.

But union density only continued to fall. By 2024, unions represented, for the first time in over a century, fewer than 6 percent of private sector workers.

Unions are still popular, but the unusually hopeful union days of 2022-2023 now seem light years away.

In the first six months of 2025, the Trump administration has ripped a gaping hole in the heart of the labor movement, exposing its vulnerability to anti-union executive orders, corporate hostility and right-wing populism. Following the playbook of Project 2025, President Trump has issued executive orders stripping collective bargaining rights from over 800,000 federal workers, the biggest single union-busting act in U.S. history.

In a first-ever, he has fired, for no cause, Democratic members of the........

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