Unfortunately, the new tariffs that Trump ordered last week — a 50% tariff on many Canadian goods and then 10%-to-12.5% tariffs on goods from over 80 countries — will be bad for the American people. They will push up prices (when affordability is already the Americans’ No. 1 concern), will slow economic growth and will anger and alienate America’s allies even more than Trump already has. That’s America’s stable genius at work.

Plus, as I explain in my article for the Guardian, Trump new tariffs are shameless — they’re based on false premises and a few absurdities. Trump, who has shown next to no concern about worker exploitation, slapped the new tariffs on over 80 countries by maintaining that they haven’t done enough to ban imports of goods made with forced labor. Noting Trump’s vast cuts in the Labor Department’s budget to fight against forced labor, child labor and human trafficking, I explain that Trump’s newfound concern about forced labor is an insincere pretext for him to use tariffs to once again beat up on other countries – something he loves to do.

Here is the link to my Guardian story about the latest twists in Trump’s tariff mania >>

I wrote a piece for the Guardian saying that the Democrats --every day from now through Election Day -- should repeatedly attack Trump’s unprecedented corruption the same way that Hungary’s opposition repeatedly attacked Viktor Orban about his immense corruption — a strategy that succeeded in ousting Hungary’s long-time authoritarian leader in elections last April.

In my Guardian piece, I write: “IF THE DEMOCRATS hope to maximize their chances of winning in this November’s elections, there’s a subject they need to scream far and wide about: Donald Trump’s immense and unprecedented corruption. The Democrats need to make clear to every American that Trump has shamelessly used his second term to increase his wealth by an astounding amount – by more than $2bn – all while millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet, their struggles made worse by Trump policies that have pushed up inflation and gas prices.

“Every day through election day, the Democrats should convey loud and clear that America’s billionaire president has focused far more on making himself richer than on improving the lives of average Americans. Trump’s corruption and conflicts of interest are so vast and outrageous that many Americans have little idea how vast and outrageous they are: ranging from Trump’s making more than $1.4bn from crypto last year to granting pardons to criminals whose families have donated to Trump’s campaign to his sons’ investing in start-up companies that receive generous help from the Trump administration.”

Here is the link to my Guardian piece: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/22/democrats-trump-corruption-midterm-elections

I would appreciate it if you shared my piece with friends — and with anyone who cares about the future of our embattled democracy. THANKS

Here is the link to my Guardian story — https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/22/trump-voter-base-support-loss

I write: “In case you’re not familiar with the concept of the K-shaped economy, it’s an important idea that captures a lot about Trump’s America. Wealthy Americans are represented by the line of the K that angles sharply upward to the right, while the line of the K that dips downward represents non-rich Americans and the difficulties they face.

“The economy’s K-shape has been growing worse in recent months, in large part because of Donald Trump’s policies. The wealthy people’s line is climbing further upward, while the line for the non-wealthy – the vast majority of Americans – has fallen further....

“For the country’s wealthy, things are going gangbusters as the S&P 500 and other stock indices keep hitting record highs, notwithstanding Trump’s costly, unsuccessful war against Iran. The richest 10% of Americans own 93% of all stock held by US households, and that means millions of average Americans aren’t feeling Wall Street’s rise – although they’re very much feeling inflation’s rise as it has climbed to nearly 4%, as hourly earnings fail to keep up with rising prices and as gas prices have jumped about 50% since Trump began bombing Iran. What’s more, workers’ hourly pay has risen by a mere 3% since 2019 (after adjusting for inflation), while corporate profits have jumped by 50%....

“Trump seems to see himself as a gilded president of, by and for the gilded class. Not only did he invite many of the world’s richest billionaires to his inauguration, he took 15 CEOs, many of them billionaires, on his trip to China. Those CEOs’ total wealth exceeded $1tn.”

Here’s the link to my Guardian story »

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/04/trump-k-shaped-economy

If you like this article, please share it. Thanks.

In the piece, I write: “The Bruce Springsteen concert I went to in Brooklyn last week was unlike any concert I’ve attended in decades. It was far more than a fabulous, joyous concert; it was also an inspiring resistance event.

From the get-go, the Boss made clear that this concert would be part of the anti-Trump resistance. It was a three-hour-long ode to the resistance and a thunderous call to Springsteen fans to step up and do more to fight for democracy and against authoritarianism. In this way, Springsteen is serving as a model for how celebrities can stand up against Trump and fight for what’s right.

At the concert I went to in the Barclays Center, Bruce said, “Our democracy, our constitution, our rule of law are being challenged right now as never before by a reckless, racist, incompetent, treasonous president and his ship of fools administration. So tonight we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope 0ver fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, truth over lies, unity over division and peace over war.”

Here is the link to my Guardian story: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/24/bruce-springsteen-trump-resistance

If you like this piece, please share it with friends. Thanks

Lastly, I would like to strongly recommend the SUSTAIN WHAT Substack written by a brilliant friend, , who writes intelligently and passionately about the environment. Andy is one of the most nation’s most knowledgeable writers about the environment and global warming.

Sustain What

A regular dose of sanity and substance amid the spin around climate and sustainability challenges.

By Andy Revkin

Musk has even said that workers shouldn’t worry because “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government” will save everyone thrown out of work by AI. That sounds great, but since Musk and other billionaires have helped elect dozens of right-wing lawmakers to Congress who are eager to shred and shrink the social safety net — just look at the recent cuts in food stamps and Medicaid — it would be foolish to rely on Musk and company to win enactment of UHI (universal high-income checks).

I wrote a story for the Guardian saying, first, that we need to be doubly dubious about the billionaires’ assurances not to worry about AI and second, that we as a nation need to move ASAP to strengthen our social safety net in important ways to help shield against the vast potential dangers of AI, including millions of layoffs, increased economic inequality and the creation of a permanent new underclass.

Here’s a link to my Guardian story: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/19/billionaires-ai-complacency-resistance

The E Street Band was tight, with several terrific musicians and a new saxophonist who reminded everyone of the great and dearly missed Clarence. Tom Morello was on hand to join Bruce in singing an intense, spirited version of The Ghost of Tom Joad. Even from the nosebleed seats, my friend Kirk and I enjoyed the concert immensely.

This Land of Hope and Dreams concert was far more than a concert. It was a resistance event -- it was part of the resistance, an ode to the resistance and a call for everyone to do more to fight for democracy and against authoritarianism.

Bruce began the evening with a tribute to America’s soldiers abroad, followed by a condemnation of the War Against Iran. The first song he performed was War (What Is It Good For). With an authoritarian-minded president in the White House, Bruce fended the night with Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom.

He of course sang his new resistance song, Streets of Minneapolis, and the crowd cheered wildly. I excerpt it:

“Against smoke and rubber bullets

In the dawn’s early light

Citizens stood for justice

Their voices ringin’ through the night

And there were bloody footprints

Where mercy should have stood

And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets

Alex Pretti and Renée Good

“Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice

Singing through the bloody mist

We’ll take our stand for this land

And the stranger in our midst

Here in our home, they killed and roamed

In the winter of ‘26

We’ll remember the names of those who died

On the streets of Minneapolis…

In our chants of “ICE out now”

Our city’s heart and soul persists

Through broken glass and bloody tears

On the streets of Minneapolis.”

Behind the E Street Band suddenly appeared giant photos of Good and Pretti. Bruce said, “Minnesota, you gave us hope. You gave us courage. And for those who gave their lives, Renee Good, mother of three, brutally murdered, and Alex Pretti, VA nurse, executed by ICE and left to die in the street without even the decency of our lawless government investigating their deaths. Their bravery, their sacrifice, and their names will not be forgotten.”

At last night’s concert and other recent concerts, Bruce really laid into Trump, who has childishly and pathetically called Springsteen a “total loser” and “not a talented guy.”

Bruce said last night and at other concerts this spring -- and I probably got the wording of some of these quotes wrong -- “This White House is destroying the American idea and our reputation around the world. To many, we are no longer looked upon as an often imperfect but strong defender of democracy standing for the global good. We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are now, to many, America the reckless, unpredictable, predatory rogue nation. That is this administration and this president’s legacy. This is happening now.”

Bruce tried to inspire solidarity, a sense of justice and lots more hope and energy to fight for what’s right. He said “The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ‘n’ roll in dangerous times . . . The America that I love — the America I have written about for 50 years that has been a beacon of hope and liberty around the world — is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and treasonous administration.”

And, very movingly, he added: “Honesty, honor, humility, truth, compassion, humanity, thoughtfulness, morality, true strength and decency — don’t let anybody tell you that these things don’t matter anymore — they do. They are at the heart of the kind of men and women we are, the kind of citizens we want to be, the kind of country we’ll be leaving to our children. So many of our elected leaders have failed us that this American tragedy can only be stopped by the American people — by you. So join us and let’s fight for the America that we love.

“Are you with us? Are you with us? Are you with us?.” As he said this, the crowd cheered wildly.

I came away inspired by Springsteen – he has more talent, morality, honesty, compassion and decency in one of his pinkies than egomaniacal, dishonest Trump has. Period.

I wish that Bruce could give a series of free, outdoor concerts across he U.S. over the next year or two or three. Many of them would attract hundreds of thousands of people, and that might help turn the tide against Trump, the most authoritarian, dishonest and corrupt president in American history.

Bravo Bruce. Long live the Boss.

Here’s the link to my story in the Guardian » https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/14/trump-drain-the-swap-billionaires

I wrote an Op-Ed about this for the Guardian, saying: “It shouldn’t be a surprise that millions of young Americans have turned against Trump, considering that he has failed to deliver on so many promises, most notably his vow to reduce prices on day one. For young people, inflation is the No 1 economic issue, far outpacing other issues, and they very much wanted Trump to focus on affordability, but Trump has focused on everything but affordability. He’s focused instead on his glitzy, $400 million ballroom, his war against Iran (which has increased gas prices), and his tariff wars (which have increased overall inflation). In bad news for Republicans, 78% of Americans under age 30 disapprove of how Trump is handling inflation.”

It’s significant that so many young people have seen through Trump and his empty promises. Let’s hope that millions more young people see through the many demagogic promises that Trump has utterly failed to deliver on, including his promises to end inflation and cut health care costs, housing prices, education costs and energy costs — not to mention his promise not to plunge the U.S. into needless wars.

I hope my Guardian piece will help more young people see through our nation’s Demagogue-in-Chief. . I conclude my piece this way: “When young Americans think of Trump, they should think: promises made, promises broken.”

Below is the link to my Guardian story. I hope it’s not obnoxious of me to say please share this people with young people you know. THANKS.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/03/young-americans-trump-elections

The title of my talk is Labor Is Under Heavy Attack. In this talk, I have already discussed how America’s workers and labor unions are under heavy attack from President Trump, corporate America and AI. But I should be emphatically clear that there are some good things going on for labor, too.

A high percentage of Americans – 68% -- approve of unions, according to Gallup, and that’s very good news for unions, especially when there is such an anti-union president. A recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that last year the number of workers represented by unions grew by 463,000 in 2025 to 16.5 million, the highest level in 16 years. With the Trump administration making it hard for workers in so many ways, more workers are looking to unions to protect them and improve their lives. At the same time, public-sector unions have rallied government workers in the face of Trump’s onslaught.

Last year workers at 125 additional Starbucks unionized despite that company’s policy of delays and more delays in reaching a contract. That is an inspiring testament to workers’ solidarity, persistence and smarts in organizing. Union apprentice programs are busier than ever. That will not only lift tens of thousands of young people into the middle class, but will strengthen unions, especially the building trades unions. That tens of thousands of graduate student workers have unionized at universities across the U.S. means that there’s a new, large and highly influential group of union members.

I can list many more union successes. Last month, workers at the la-di-da Harvard Club in Boston unionized, with the 160 workers voting 2 to 1 to unionize. WNBA players won a landmark contract, guaranteeing the players 20% of the league’s gross revenue and creating a much higher pay range, ranging from a minimum of $240,000 to $1.4 million – still far lower than the NBA. The salary cap for WNBA teams soared to $7 million from $1.5 million, making far more money available for player salaries.

After a four-week strike against Kaiser Permanente, 31,000 nurses and health care workers on the West Coast won a 21.5% raise over four years– including a 16% raise in the first two years. That contract contains innovative measures to decrease “chronic understaffing” and thereby ease workloads. In January, the California Nurses Association won an 18.5% wage increase over four years for 25,000 nurses as well as provision guaranteeing nurses a central role in selecting and designing new technology, including A.I. systems

There have also been important union victories in the anti-union South. In March, the Virginia General Assembly enacted legislation that gives state and local government employees across Virginia the freedom to form unions and bargain collectively. Over 500,000 government workers in Virginia will have the ability to unionize and bargain.

In Georgia, where a mere 4% of workers are unionized, the United Steelworkers and Jobs to Move America pulled off a major victory: 1,500 workers at the Blue Bird electric bus plant in rural Georgia voted to unionize. The vote was 697 for the union and 435 against. The union then won a strong contract: a minimum raise of 12% over four years, with the lowest-paid workers getting raises of over 40%. There will also be profit-sharing and a retirement plan.

The UAW achieved a landmark victory at Volkswagen in Chattanooga this past February, winning the first union contract at a foreign-owned auto plant in the South. For a while, it looked as if the VW contract talks were going at a glacial pace to nowhere as we’ve seen at Starbucks, Amazin, REI and other companies. The VW workers authorized a strike, and that threat, that pressure helped them get VW to agree to a first contract. The VW workers finally reached their first contract 22 months after the Chattanooga workers voted 73% to 27% in favor of joining the UAW. In their contract, the 3,000 unionized VW workers won a 20% raise over four years, a $6,550 ratification bonus, annual bonuses of $2,550, and reduced payments toward their health coverage.

Yolanda Peoples, who works on VW’s engine assembly line, rejoiced about the contract. “I hope that the other plants here in the South are watching,” she said. “We just achieved something that everyone thought that we would not be able to do. We now have our seat at the table, and it’s going to be life-changing for a lot of people in our plant.”

After the contract was reached, UAW president Sean Fain said, “To all the non-union autoworkers listening out there, this is your victory, too. A better life is out there, and it starts with joining the UAW.”

The UAW’s hope, labor’s hope is that the VW contract will lead to more organizing victories in the South.

While these are all important successes, in ways I think the most promising and positive recent development for labor is that the AFL-CIO has thrown its weight strongly behind the No Kings movement. In urging union members in all 50 states to participate in last Saturday’s protests, the AFL-CIO said, “Since Inauguration Day, the radical pages of Project 2025 and the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on America’s workers.”

The AFL-CIO added: “The Trump administration has committed the single biggest act of union-busting in history, attacked good jobs across the country, launched a brutal assault on immigrants, ripped health care from millions, jeopardized the essential services that working families rely on and threatened our fundamental freedoms. Enough is enough.

The AFL-CIO further said: “Labor unions are taking action, speaking up and fighting back! The labor movement will be in the streets on Saturday, March 28, for No Kings Day to powerfully say that our government doesn’t answer to a king—it answers to working people.”

To my mind, the nation’s union movement will be on the defensive so long as Donald Trump and other anti-union MAGA types are running the country. The union movement will be on the defensive so long as billionaires like Elon Musk and mighty corporations have such huge influence over the government and its policies. In my opinion, right now there’s one thing unions and workers need to focus on above all else to advance the long-time goal of building worker power and improving the lives of American workers. And that is to oppose the most authoritarian president in US history, one who is extremely anti-union and extremely close to many billionaires – Elon Musk donated some $280 million to his campaign.

There’s one aspect of this I often focus on – we desperately need to fix our very broken campaign finance system in which the wealthy and ultra-wealthy have far too much power. Believe it or not, in the 2024 elections, 100 billionaire families donated $2.4 billion for federal elections –- those 100 families contributed one-sixth of ALL THE money candidates spent.

Long term, the best way for unions and workers to achieve a brighter future will be to fix the U.S. government so it’s not dominated by authoritarian-minded leaders, billionaires and powerful corporations. And we need to fix state governments, too. We need to fix government so that lawmakers truly listen to the concerns of average Americans – the concerns of auto workers and nurses and teachers and steelworkers and Amazon workers and homecare workers.

Presidents Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden – five Democratic presidents -- all sought to enact legislation to make it easier for workers to unionize to improve their lives. But all five times, that legislation was blocked by a Republican filibuster because so many lawmakers chose to do corporations’ bidding instead of doing what’s best to lift American workers. Along the same unfortunate lines, the federal minimum wage has been stuck for 17 years now at the dismally low rate of $7.25 because many lawmakers keep knuckling under to corporate America and keep refusing to increase it.

In conclusion, that is why I say we desperately need to fix our democracy before unions and workers can move meaningfully forward.

What’s more, in seeking to increase the Pentagon’s budget to a supersized $1.5 trillion, Trump is pushing Congress to enact painful cuts in health, house and education programs to help finance his supersized military budget.

I wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian about Trump’s push for a vastly increased Pentagon budget, which would be an astounding two-thirds larger than Joe Biden’s last military budget from just two years ago. It is little understood that the U.S. military budget is already greater than the combined military budgets of the next nine countries that spend the most on defense.

In my Guardian piece, I urge everyone to contact Republicans and Democrats in Congress to urge them to shoot down warmonger Trump’s fantasies of having a supersized Pentagon budget. I write: “In seeking a mammoth increase in military spending while cutting social programs, Trump is again showing how hollow his promises were about making life better for typical Americans.”

Here is the link to my new piece in the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/21/trump-military-pentagon-budget

THERE’S OF COURSE another front where America’s workers face a serious threat, and that’s artificial intelligence. What is little understood is that AI can threaten labor unions, too.

In any basic labor relations course, we learn that when workers feel vulnerable, when they feel less secure about their jobs, they are less likely to stick their necks out to form a union or fight for better pay and conditions. A corollary of that is that when workers feel more vulnerable, employers feel greater power over them whether in contract negotiations or a strike.

Artificial intelligence unfortunately threatens millions of workers and, as I will explain, it threatens unions, too.

Dario Amodie, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies, has predicted that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs over the next one to five years and cause the jobless rate to jump to 10% to 20%. This past October, Bernie Sanders, the top Democrat on the Senate’s Education and Labor Committee, issued a worrisome report warning that AI and automation could replace up to 97 million jobs in the US over the next decade. Bernie’s report notes that Amazon, Walmart, UnitedHealth Group, JPMorgan Chase and other companies are telling investors that AI will enable them to slash payrolls.

“Working people built this country,” Bernie said in introducing that report. “They deserve to benefit from new technology, not be thrown out on the street while billionaires get even richer.”

The advancements we’ve seen in AI have fueled worries that AI will make today’s enormous income inequality even worse as wealthy investors in AI grow even wealthier while millions of workers lose their jobs and perhaps form a new underclass struggling to make ends meet.

Many of us have seen newspaper stories and TV reports about how today’s job market is especially tough for new college graduates, with many people blaming AI for taking jobs long done by new grads – like coding and accounting.

Last October, I moderated a panel discussion on AI and the Future of Work at the City University of New York. That panel included Daron Acemoglu, an MIT economist and winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics. Acemoglu said there were essentially two routes for developing AI: an anti-worker route and a pro-worker route. He voiced dismay that tech companies were focused on the anti-worker route — a route that aims to develop AI in ways that maximize automation and maximize job reductions.

Professor Acemoglu said today’s AI “craze is really an automation agenda” which “is going to eliminate more and more jobs.” He said tech companies were shunning the pro-worker route in which AI would be used to work with workers, to increase their skill levels and make them more capable and valuable to employers. That way AI would result in far fewer job losses. Acemoglu said it was unfortunate that the AI companies’ strategy is to maximize profits and automation – and job reductions, too.

As we’ve seen, the Trump administration has essentially given AI companies a green light to pursue whatever strategies they want, workers and the public be damned. Trump can’t be bothered that AI might someday cause millions of layoffs.

AI and related tools have made it far easier for companies to do intense and broad surveillance of their workers, whether reading their emails, measuring how many keystrokes they type a minute or measuring how much time they spend going to the bathroom. This surveillance will no doubt make many workers more vulnerable and more careful

Virginia Doellgast, a professor of employment relations at Cornell’s ILR school, told me: “Workers are being constantly monitored, and AI-based monitoring tools can make mistakes that can translate into unfair pay cuts or firings. Workers often don’t know what monitoring tools are being used, what data the tools are collecting or how that data is used to evaluate their performance.”

When I interviewed, Dan Reynolds, assistant research director for the Communications Workers of America union, he was also very concerned about AI. He told me, “AI is often used to speed up work, deskill work, make workplaces more stressful and make jobs more demanding. Our concern about AI isn’t just its effect on the number of jobs, but how it will affect the quality of jobs.”

AI and AI surveillance are already being used in specific ways against unions. The publication Union Track wrote, “Anti-labor organizations are finding ways to harness AI to profile, spy on, and retaliate against union sympathizers and workers who attempt to form a union.”

In an article in the Georgetown University Journal on Poverty Law and Policy, Grace Scott wrote: “In workplaces where every step, every conversation, and every bathroom break is recorded and retained, what’s to stop employers from merely adjusting how they use that information to detect union organizing?” It’s well known that some companies use AI to identify when workers use evil, horrible words like union, unionize or organize in emails or messages sent on corporate email system or internal communications systems.

Amazon uses AI-aided camera tracking to surveil its warehouse employees – for instance, it counts the time that workers spend interacting with other workers as “time off task.” If monitoring shows that a worker spent over 30 minutes’ time off task in a single day, that can result in a written warning. Workers whom AI sees spending too much time interacting with co-workers might be suspected of seeking to organize a union

Yanis Varoufakis, an economics professor in Athens, Greece, reports that in Europe, Amazon has “a centralized AI [that] can detect union-friendly phrases and behaviors in every Amazon warehouse automatically in real time and at zero cost.” That data, he explains, feeds into the AI which learns “how to devise strategies to neutralize their programmed target” – meaning Amazon’s pro-union employees.

AI is also being used for scabbing. I was sorry to learn recently that the Guardian, the progressive newspaper I often write for, used AI to help write headlines when its workers in London went on strike for four days.

The worst example I’ve seen about how AI being used against unions is this. In 2023, helpline workers at the National Eating Disorders Association voted to f unionize as part of an organizing drive by the Communications Workers of America. Several days later, the Eating Disorders Association laid off its entire helpline staff. It told the workers that they were being replaced by an AI chatbot named Tessa. Abbie Harper, one of the laid-off workers, said, “I’m of the immovable belief that we were all fired for unionizing.”

In On Labor, a blog out of Harvard Law School, Jeffrey Vogt and Ruban Sobasinghe recently warned of companies using AI for scabbing. They wrote, “In the minority of [countries] that allow for the use of replacement workers during economic strikes, such as the United States, employers will no doubt use human and AI replacement labor to apply economic pressure to undermine the effectiveness of industrial action.”

Jack London once wrote that scabs are capital’s most formidable weapon. London wrote that a scab is the person who breaks strikes. We might have to update that to say, Ai is a thing that also breaks strikes. In their article, Vogt and Sobasinghe warn that “there is simply no time to waste” to enact legislation that will prohibit employers from using AI from further undermining workers’ right to strike. I imagine that some European countries might pass such legislation, but getting the U.S. Congress to pass such legislation will be extremely difficult considering how much influence corporate lobbyists and billionaire donors have.

Here’s one item the labor movement should put on its agenda: build and spearhead a broad movement that will fight to limit the harmful effects of AI and protect workers hurt by this daunting new technology.

I wrote a piece for the Guardian arguing that it’s urgent that the U.S. Supreme Court put some limits on Trump’s use -- or I should say serial misuse -- of the pardoning power that the Constitution gives to presidents.

In my piece, I write: “If the supreme court continues to maintain that the pardon power can’t be limited, that could prove truly perilous to our democracy. It’s hard to deny that Trump’s pardons of over 1,500 insurrectionists and election deniers will embolden more insurrections and election denial that threaten our rule of law and our elections. Trump’s pardons will also encourage more criminals and their families to buy pardons that make a mockery of the rule of law.

“The supreme court needs to stop turning a blind eye. It needs to step up and stop Trump from using his pardon power as a springboard for scandal and sedition.”

Here’s the link to my full Guardian story: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/15/trump-supreme-court

Apologies that the Guardian’s official style is to lower case supreme court and constitution.

To my mind, that first Starbucks unionization victory in December 2021 was an important landmark and impressive achievement, first, because Starbucks was such a fiercely anti-union company, second, because Starbucks is such a hugely famous company and brand, and third, because that victory showed a new excitement about unions from young workers. Several months after that first Starbucks victory, there was perhaps an even more important union win when workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island in New York City voted to unionize, becoming the first Amazon operation in the U.S. to unionize.

That Amazon win was also a humongous victory. I had thought that if there was any place that would be impossible to ever unionize, it would be an Amazon warehouse, first, because those warehouses have so many workers – the Staten Island warehouse had over 7,000 workers. Second, I thought unionizing Amazon would be impossible because Amazon was so aggressively, ferociously anti-union – it even put anti-union posters in the toilet stalls. When workers at on the can, an anti-union poster would start them in the face. Also making unionizing difficult was the way Amazon warehouses operated. It was very-to-extremely hard for Amazon’s perpetually rushed warehouse workers to talk to each other at work. The Amazon union victory in Staten Island was announced on April 1, 2022, but those workers still don’t have a contract.

In 2022, along with the Amazon win, there were also landmark union victories at Trader Joe’s, REI, Chipotle and even several Apple stores.

Suddenly unions were back in the news. Unions were cool again. There were tons of stories about young workers hungry to unionize. Young workers were frustrated and angry about how they were treated during the pandemic, frustrated and angry about not being treated with respect, frustrated and angry about having to put their lives on the line during the pandemic by being required to report to work day after day for meager pay while their $200,000-a-year or $500,000-a-year or million-a-year bosses worked remotely and safely from home. I remember an In These Times headline from four years ago: “The New Labor Movement is Young, Worker-Led and Winning.” And this L.A. Times headline: “A New Generation is Reviving Unions.”

In one story, Maykalah Turner-Sweeney, a barista at a newly unionized Starbucks in Fairfield, Connecticut, said, “By forming a union here, we can make this workplace better for everyone. I’ve given four years of my life to this company, and I know we all deserve better.”

Another story quoted Maizie Jensen, a Starbucks barista in Sacramento, who said, “I am overjoyed that despite Starbucks using every dirty trick to deter us, we were able to become true partners in the company.”

That was a hopeful time for unions. Joe Biden was in office, arguably the most enthusiastically pro-union president in U.S. history. The American public’s approval of unions had climbed to its highest levels in six decades. Many companies seemed surprised, defensive, even alarmed when a Gallup poll showed that as many young Americans approved of socialism as approved of capitalism.

Well, what can I say? HOW things have changed in just a few years. The pendulum has swung way back, as companies have increasingly dug in against unions -- partly in response to Donald Trump’s fierce and repeated attacks against public-sector unions. Those attacks include his extraordinarily anti-union decision to strip one million federal workers of their ability to bargain collectively. I’m sorry to say that not one of the nearly 700 unionized Starbucks has a union contract. Nor have the Amazon workers in Staten Island reached a contract. Sadly, the Staten Island warehouse remains the only unionized Amazon warehouse in the U.S.

And REI – which holds itself as famously progressive – has yet to reach a contract with any of its 11 unionized stores. REI has hired an expert and aggressive anti-union law firm, Morgan Lewis, to handle – some would say slow walk -- its contract negotiations.

Ditto with Trader Joe’s. Even though workers at a Trader Joe’s in Hadley, Massachusetts voted 45 to 31 in July 2022 to become the first unionized TJ’s, none of the nation’s four unionized Trader Joes have a contract. By the way, Morgan Lewis also represents Trader Joe’s in its contract negotiations. We should give credit to Apple because, unlike the others, it has reached first contracts with its unionized stores.

After first unionizing four or so years ago, workers at Starbucks, Amazon, REI and Trader Joe’s all complain about their corporations’ stalling tactics, which they say are deliberately aimed at preventing the workers and their union from ever reaching a contract. But those corporations insist they are bargaining in good faith and ready to reach a contract if the terms are good for the company.

Daisy Pitkin, director of Starbucks Workers United, said recently that Starbucks has presented no new contract proposals in a year, since April 2025 after Starbucks workers rejected the company’s economic proposals—which included a modest 2%-a-year raise. When a union like Starbucks Workers United achieves landmark unionization victories at a powerful company, the workers are of course eager to win substantial economic gains. So it seems like a definite slap in the face when the company offers the union a mere 2% a year raise, which would unarguably leave workers trailing behind inflation. Some labor experts call this this bad faith bargaining. What’s more, corporate executives know that the NLRB, with President Trump’s pro-business appointees on the board, is very unlikely to rule that their companies are bargaining in bad faith no matter how much they delay, delay, delay in negotiating contracts.

Many of these companies’ workers are growing increasingly frustrated and angry. I suspect that’s part of some corporations’ strategies: to make workers feel so frustrated about not reaching a good union contract that they will throw up their hands and say it’s not worth bothering to have a union. That’s not the union’s fault—that the strategy of many companies. Death by a thousand delays. Death by a thousand cuts.

Starbucks workers have grown so frustrated that they held strikes at 145 Starbucks last November. Workers in the REI union have also grown so frustrated that they’ve voted to call for boycotting the company, but they’re holding off on that move to see whether significant progress is made to reach a contract.

As if that isn’t bad enough for unionized workers, several billionaires are taking far more aggressive tack toward undermining unions. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has filed a lawsuit to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional. Billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Amazon and billionaire Howard Schultz’s Starbucks have also filed suit to have the labor board declared unconstitutional. This is the first time since the 1930s that American corporations have tried to cripple the NLRB. This means that several important U.S. corporations want to paralyze the one agency that oversees unionization efforts and cracks down on corporations’ illegal anti-union behavior, such as firing pro-union workers.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit – covering Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi – ruled last August in the SpaceX case that the way the NLRB is structured is probably unconstitutional. The Fifth Circuit upheld a lower court’s injunction, provisionally ruling that the National Labor Relations Act is unconstitutional because it limits President Trump’s power to fire NLRB administrative law judges whenever he wants. The Fifth Circuit clearly embraced the unitary executive theory, which aims to heap more power on presidents. That circuit court has yet to issue a final decision in the SpaceX case. That case about the NLRB’s constitutionality could well make its way to the Supreme Court, but I worry how the very pro-corporate Roberts Court will rule in that case. I worry that it, too, might declare the NLRB unconstitutional.

The billionaires – Musk, Bezos, Schulz, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen – want nothing to do with unions. My sense is they wished that unions didn’t exist. Marc Andreessen, the ubiquitous venture capitalist who is close to Trump, once said “there may have been a time and a place for unions, but not sure I see it anymore.” Musk has said, “I disagree with the idea of unions.”

When Trump named Musk to run DOGE, we saw how Musk seemed as unworried and unfeeling about terminating thousands of federal employees as he would have been if he were killing a flea. It ruly worried me that someone who cared so little about workers was suddenly appointed Lord High Executioner over the entire federal bureaucracy. Truth be told, I feel alarmed about the growing billionaire-government nexus.

Musk also seems intent on building the world’s leading robot company. He wrote recently, “AI and robots will replace all jobs,” (although he said workers would have the option to work.) Great, so the richest person in the world, worth an estimated $680 billion, not only sees no need for unions, but sees no need for workers.

You don’t need me to tell you this, but what’s needed is far more worker solidarity to resist — and hopefully overcome — these dismaying trends.

I’m sorry to say that America’s labor unions and workers are under heavy attack. They unfortunately face a series of serious attacks on several fronts. On too many fronts.

Let me start with the first front. In recent years, after I retired from the New York Times, I have been a frequent contributor to the Guardian newspaper, and I have repeatedly written that Donald Trump is easily the most anti-union president in at least a century. I believe that Trump is far more anti-union than Ronald Reagan, who broke the air-traffic controllers’ strike and fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers because they walked out in an illegal strike. Those firings sent a powerful anti-union message throughout the nation. But Donald Trump’s unprompted move to eliminate collective bargaining rights for one million federal employees and void many of their union contracts has sent a stronger, more emphatic anti-union message. Trump’s move was a unilateral effort not just to stomp on labor, but to intimidate unions and send a message to corporate America that it’s time to get tougher with unions.

When I interviewed AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler about Trump’s move to strip one million workers of their right to bargain, she told me. “That’s the largest single act of union-busting in our history.” That’s saying a lot because the United States has a long and ugly history of union-busting. I remember reading of the courageous organizers for the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, who were actually lynched in the early 20^th century in Washington State and Oregon because the moneyed class was upset that they were seeking to unionize lumberjacks, miners and other workers.

After Trump sought to eliminate bargaining for one million federal workers, I interviewed Justin Chen, president of an American Federation of Government Employees union council that represented 8,000 EPA workers across the U.S. Chen was furious that Trump had halted collective bargaining for EPA employees and voided most of their union contracts. “Whatever he said about fighting for workers was a complete lie,” Chen told me. “He treats federal employees with a great deal of disdain, not as civil servants valuable to make our government and economy run.”

I also interviewed Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank in Washington. Shierholz said the “absolute scale of crushing unions” under Trump is “on a whole different scale from what we saw under Reagan. Trump is saying it’s absolutely open season on union folks. He took an absolute chainsaw to the federal workforce. He’s giving the green light to the private sector and local government to do the same.”

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Candidate Trump vigorously wooed and wowed blue-collar workers and union members across the Midwest and the entire United States. Trump vowed to fight for “all the forgotten men and women.” He promised to bring back manufacturing plants and factory jobs. He denounced the Democrats for bringing us the North American Free Trade Agreement, which badly hurt many Midwestern states. Trump failed to mention, though, that it was a Republican President, George H.W. Bush, who originally negotiated NAFTA and that a far higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats in Congress voted to ratify that agreement. But, yes, Democrat Bill Clinton pushed Congress to ratify NAFTA.

To reassure workers and unions, Trump insisted that he knew nothing about Project 2025, which was full of proposals to weaken unions and make life tougher for workers. Project 2025 called for massive layoffs of federal employees and for abolishing all public-sector unions including firefighters’ unions, police unions and unions of other city and state workers. Project 2025 called for abolishing card check, one of labor’s most effective tools for organizing workers. Project 2025 also recommended letting teenagers “work in more dangerous occupations,” like metal-stamping plants with heavy machinery, plants where workers have gotten hands amputated and limbs crushed.

Project 2025 was a horror for workers and unions, but that didn’t stop Trump from making one of its two main authors, Russell Vought, one of the most powerful officials in his administration, as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. While Stephen Miller calls the shots on immigration, Vought calls the shots on running the federal bureaucracy. Before Trump elevated Vought, Vought had said something shockingly and singularly cruel about workers. Vought said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains… We want them in trauma.”

My question to Donald Trump: why in the world would a president who holds himself out as a friend of workers appoint someone to a top position who harbors such contempt and cruelty toward workers? I’m sure some readers already have an answer to my question: despite what Trump says, he isn’t really a true friend of America’s workers.

In the 2016, 2020 and 2024 campaigns, Trump vowed to help coal miners, but that didn’t stop second-term Trump from halting enforcement of a Biden-era regulation that protects miners from silicosis, which is a dangerous form of black lung, a debilitating disease that has killed many miners. often deadly disease. Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, the labor-friendly chair of the National Labor Relations Board – it was the first time a president ever fired an NLRB member, and he fired Wilcox without cause, in violation of the law. That left the NLRB without a quorum for over a year – so the labor board couldn’t, for instance, protect workers from corporations’ illegal anti-union tactics. Trump has now replaced Wilcox with some business-friendly NLRB members.

The list of Trump’s anti-worker and anti-union actions goes on and on. Trump cut the minimum wage that federal contractors must pay their workers, chopping it from $17.75 an hour to $13.20 hour. That means many workers lost a huge chunk of change -- over $9,000 a year in wages. The Trump administration has proposed eliminating any minimum wage protections for nearly 4 million domestic workers who help older and disabled people in their homes. This means they can be paid less than the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. Trump’s Labor Department has made it far easier for employers to wrongly classify workers as independent contractors – a move that saves employers money while screwing workers because workers will lose overtime and minimum wage protections, workers’ compensation protections and protections against employment discrimination.

Trump has cut staffing by 12% at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In 2025, Trump’s OSHA conducted 20% fewer inspections and issued 42% fewer fines than OSHA did in 2024 under Biden. As part of his newly proposed budget, Trump wants to cut the NLRB’s budget even though that agency has been plagued for years by understaffing – the result of Republicans refusing to budget it enough money.

Global warming is of course a serious problem – and NOT A HOAX as Trump keeps saying. In August 2024, OSHA under President Biden proposed a new rule to protect indoor and outdoor workers from high temperatures. It called for access to paid rest breaks, cool water, and time to acclimate to extreme temperatures. This regulation would have protected 36 million workers and prevented thousands of heat-related injuries and illnesses a year. But Trump indefinitely suspended that heat rule. In doing so, he ignored the pleas of labor leaders and did what corporate America wanted.

Trump’s appointees to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have repeatedly attacked diversity, equity and inclusion programs aim to assure fairness and opportunity for minorities and women. Trump acts as if efforts to assure equal opportunity are a crime .In an effort to help white workers in particular, Trump’s EEOC chair, Andrea Lucas, has asked white men in particular for help in “identifying and attacking race and sex discrimination — including against white male applicants and employees.”

Trump’s mass deportations have terrified hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants who have sought to create a better life for their families. Trump’s mass deportations have made immigrant workers in general more frightened about speaking up about problems at work, such as wage or safety violations. What’s more, these deportations of immigrant workers have often meant that the co-workers who remain at their workplace have to pick up the slack and face increased workloads and stress.

While Trump promised to increase the number of factory jobs, he has in ways sabotaged manufacturing. Many experts say the immense tariff chaos he created goes far to explain why the US lost 108,000 factory jobs last year. What’s more, Trump’s short-sighted decisions to shut down huge, unionized wind turbine projects have caused thousands of layoffs. So has Trump’s benighted decision to pull the plug on Biden’s efforts to spur green manufacturing of electric cars and batteries.

When I asked AFL-CIO president Shuler to assess Trump’s performance vis-à-vis America’s workers, she was blunt and brutal. “It’s a big betrayal,” she told me. “He is stripping away regulations that protect workers. His attacks on unions are coming fast and furious. He talks a good game of being for working people, but he’s doing the absolute opposite.”

No worker should be fooled by Trump’s demagogic claims that he is fighting for workers.

As I wrote in an opinion piece for the Guardian that was posted today/Monday, “Trump has boasted about cutting prescription drug prices, housing prices, food prices and gasoline prices. All that might be great public relations for Trump, but it’s grossly exaggerated nonsense. Trump’s much-ballyhooed efforts to fight inflation are essentially diddlysquat. Many of them are mini efforts that have had mini effects in reducing prices. They’re as meaningful as a degree from Trump University.”

Americans shouldn’t be fooled by Trump’s slick salesmanship.

My perhaps naive hope is that a good number of people who voted for Trump will read my Guardian story and see that Trump has utterly failed to deliver on his promises to reduce prices on Day One. If you’re so inclined, please shares this piece with friends. Thanks.

Here’s a link to my Guardian story.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/06/trump-affordability-prices-economy

The Guardian newspaper had a story about the annual report of the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University in Sweden. The institute wrote that “The United States of America (USA) stands out as a conspicuous example” of regime transformation. “It is an exceptional new autocratizer ... The extensive damage already done to American democracy under the second Trump presidency – in just one year – stands out on the world map.” The report added that “the speed of decline of” democracy in the U.S. is “comparable to some coups d´états.”

Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute, told the Guardian, “What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country [United States].”

Discussing a process that he called “autocratization,” Lindberg added, “For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year.”

In reading the Guardian story and the report of the Gothenburg Institute, I got the sense that the Gothenburg researchers must be appalled and agape at the astonishingly rapid deterioration of democracy in the U.S. as Trump pushes full speed ahead toward authoritarianism.

“We’ve seen a very fast concentration of power in the executive wing,” Lindberg, the institute’s director, said. “”The legislative branch has practically abdicated its powers to the president. It no longer functions as a check on executive power.”

Here is a link to the Guardian story » https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2026/mar/17/trump-is-aiming-for-dictatorship-thats-the-verdict-of-the-worlds-most-credible-democracy-watchdog

And here is a link to the annual democracy report of the Varieties of Democracy Institute » https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026_lowres.pdf

In my story, I write: “In today’s new Gilded Age, the 900-plus billionaires in the US have far too much influence over our elections, our economy, our government policies and our news media.”

“Eleven billionaires with a combined worth of $1.35 trillion attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration or surrounding events

“In the 2024 elections, the top six donors each gave more than $100 million and each contributed overwhelmingly to Republicans. Together those six donated nearly $1 billion . According to OpenSecrets, Musk topped the list with more than $280 million, , while Timothy Mellon, an 83-year-old banking heir, was second at $197 million. Miriam Adelson, widow of a casino magnate, was third at $147 million.

“Showing how the system serves billionaires, the ultra-rich elite won lots of goodies in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Of its $2 trillion in tax cuts, $750 billion will reportedly go to the richest 1% of Americans.

“The richest 1%, whose wealth has more than doubled since 2017, owns 32% of the nation’s wealth, more than 10 times the 2.5% share owned by the bottom 50%.”

“It’s urgent for Americans to create a movement to curb their power in order to preserve what’s left of our democracy and assure we have an economy with some basic fairness.”

Here’s the link to my Guardian story about billionaires being too powerful » https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/15/billionaire-curb-power-movement

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/15/billionaire-curb-power-movement