Happy Labor Day! And Some Random Thoughts About Organized Labor and Trump's War on Labor.

Organized Labor (key word: "organized") has achieved much throughout American history. Safer places to work + live. Much, much better wages. Financial stability for many. Jobs with benefits. And more.

Fellow Workers,

I grew up a hardscrabble kid in a hardscrabble family in a hardscrabble town, working class through and through. It was small town America in the 1980s. My people were butchers and gas station workers and farmers and construction types, part of the vast getting by but struggling masses. We did own (with debt) the lot that our trailer houses were parked upon most of the time, thank you very much. We didn’t have to pay rapacious rents to the local slumlord.

The working class identity came blaring through the ever-present radio. We got quiet when Paul Harvey came on so we could listen (though I never remember talking about it afterwords, just like we never talked about the sermon after church for some reason). We turned it up to George and Tammy the way to the barn or to work or school. We were the ones “that drive the big rig, up and down the road; the one out in the warehouse, bringing in the load; the waitress; the mechanic. . . .” You get the idea.

{NOTE—It’s not lost on me that a key feature in the air of my rural upbringing was hating on Donald Trump, the people like him, their greed/look-at-me preening, their fancy-rich-kid-big-city ways.}

Then, when I was nearing the end of K-12 school journey, something miraculous happened. Both of my parents got union jobs. And while it didn’t matter that much in the first few years, my parents are now both happily retired with pensions, a nice home they own outright, a few hundred acres, a bunch of cows, functioning farm equipment and money to fix it if it breaks down, retirement savings, long-term economic security, the ability to go anywhere they want on trips, etc. Unions did them right.

Union jobs—not hard work—made the difference between having something and having very little to my Mom and Dad. They always worked their asses off, but non-union work just didn’t pay the same. And may the gods bless the fine people way back when who gave us the American Postal Workers Union and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Thanks Unions, for making it possible for my parents’ hard work to make a difference in the long term for my family’s economic livelihood. And for protecting my parents for the most part from potentially serious health problems and injuries from their work (moving heavy mail, burning coal in a gigantic power plant to make electricity).

Unfortunately, as we celebrate Labor Day 2025, the number of working people in Unions has continued a long-term decline. Taking a look at the numbers, the most recent federal government statistics estimate that:

The union membership rate—the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions—was 9.9 percent in 2024, little changed from the prior year. . . . The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.3 million, also showed little movement over the year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union members.

Further:

• The union membership rate of public-sector workers (32.2 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (5.9 percent).

• The highest unionization rates were among workers in education, training, and library occupations (32.3 percent) and protective service occupations (29.6 percent).

• Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 85 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($1,138 versus $1,337).

If these same reports are still conducted under the Trump Administration (and that’s a real question), the data will reflect a serious dip in Union worker representation once 2025 is taken into account. Just look at that 32.2% figure for public sector workers. These government workers are the very people Trump and his minions have attacked with their firings, their witch-hunts, their targeted killings of entire departments.

Trump and the Trump Republican war on the working class has extended beyond Unions, of course. Trump’s people are disappearing workers and targeting the Black and Brown among us via gunpoint. Federal troops are or have been occupying forces in Los Angeles, CA, and Washington, D.C. They are instituting budget sanctions to punish the working class and poor by reducing benefits like Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and better infrastructure (cleaner water, public transportation to get to work, affordable electricity, some limited affordable housing programs). They are destroying trillions of dollars of job-creating brick-and-mortar projects to punish what they see as their enemies.

Labor Day 2025 is a dark time for Labor and us working class people, unfortunately. But I guess there isn’t always a lot of love on Valentine’s Day, now is there? Holidays are hard for some of us.

But all is not lost, dear reader of The Cocklebur. There’s some kind of quote about hope that certainly applies. Just like our ancestors who broke through “labor unrest” a century or so ago, there is potential in organizing. Organizing as workers. Organizing as communities. Organizing through our Movements. And, yes, organizing against corporate power and real estate developers and polluters of all stripes (NOTE—if the political advisors and “thinkers” inside your party think that constantly blasting NIMBYs is good politics, enjoy your time in the perpetual minority) + (NOTE #2—added with an edit due to reader Matt Barron’s email to me that I forgot when reading through my notes this am—if the political advisors and “thinkers” inside your party think that passing pro-Labor legislation like the PRO Act when you’re in power is bad politics, enjoy your time in the perpetual minority).

Happy Labor Day out there, Cocklebur Reader. Hopefully you have the day off, courtesy of the Labor Movement. Heck, hopefully you aren’t even reading this until tomorrow (September 2nd, 2025), post Labor Day. Congress will be back. Fights will flare up. New fronts will emerge.

From a Class War bunker somewhere in the Willamette River Valley,

—Bryce

Proud Member, Industrial Workers of the World.

Publisher, The Cocklebur.

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The Cocklebur covers rural policy and politics from a progressive point-of-view. Our work focuses on a tangled rural political reality of dishonest debate, economic and racial disparities, corporate power over our democracy, and disinformation peddled by conservative media outlets. We aim to use facts, data, and science to inform our point-of-view. We wear our complicated love/WTF relationship with rural America on our sleeve.