‘A very hostile climate for workers’: US labor movement struggles under Trump

On a cold January day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, workers at a Whole Foods Market store in the heart of the city made history. Organizers won a vote to form a union for the very first time in one of the grocery chain’s 530 US stores.

Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, which has spent years quashing unionization efforts within its sprawling empire. This result amounted to another blow in the tech giant’s armor.

Workers at Starbucks had shown in the preceding years how – in the face of heavy resistance from a determined multinational employer – one such victory could set the stage for hundreds more. A new wave of momentum had taken hold in the US labor movement.

“We are excited to begin the next chapter of this journey,” declared the Workers of Whole Foods Center City Philadelphia. Once they had turned the page, however, the chapter proved slow and arduous.

Just one week before the Whole Foods union ballot result came through, Donald Trump returned to the White House. On his watch a crucial federal agency overseeing the US labor force has been “crippled”, according to insiders – and the new wave of momentum waned.

Excitement gave way to frustration in Philadelphia. “Due to the fact that the NLRB isn’t functioning … we’re just waiting around,” said Ed Dupree, who works at the Whole Foods Center City store.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the top US labor watchdog, is tasked with protecting workers’ rights, overseeing the labor movement and ruling on disputes between employers and unions.

Its five-seat board, which hears disputes and oversees union elections, requires at least three members to issue a ruling. But days after regaining power, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox – an unprecedented decision – from the board, leaving it without this crucial quorum to make decisions.

Across the labor movement, many workers, in Philadelphia and far beyond, have been enshrouded in uncertainty ever since.

Rather than recognize the result of the vote, Whole Foods objected, triggering a long process of delays and legal challenges. While a regional NLRB director sided with the union, ruling against Whole Foods’ objections, a spokesperson for the chain told the Guardian it “strongly” disagrees with the regional director’s decision, and claimed UFCW 1776, the union behind the unionization drive, “illegally interfered” with the vote.

It continued to appeal, taking the case all the way to the top of the paralyzed NLRB, where it’s sat ever since – in limbo. In 2024, the board issued around 150 decisions on labor disputes. Over the past 11 months under Trump, it has issued six.

“The Trump administration thus far seems to have been treating the agency with this kind of combination of hostility and aggressive neglect,” said Lauren McFerran, who served as chair of the NLRB under Joe Biden. “This is an administration that professes to be very pro-worker in its orientation, but we haven’t had a functional agency to resolve labor disputes and to protect workers rights … in a year.”

In an interview, the NLRB’s acting general counsel denied the agency has been neglected – and compared its decision to scrap certain policies amid budget constraints with a family, spending carefully. “You can’t always go to Disney World,” said William Cowen.

Four current rank-and-file workers spoke to the Guardian. Each requested anonymity, fearing retaliation.

“The NLRB’s employees just want to do our jobs and be treated with respect,” said one official. “But from day one, this administration has crippled the agency, and treated us as enemies.”

Staff can see “firsthand the damage that is being done”, the staffer continued, claiming they and their colleagues had been left “demoralized and disgusted” by Trump’s agenda.

The National Labor Relations Act, enacted in 1935 to federally protect workers’ rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining, now exists “on paper only”, the official claimed.

“So far I think we are relieved the agency has not been shut down,” added a longtime legal staff employee. “Many employees have left, either through the ‘fork in the road’; retirement; or going to the private sector.”

Trump nominated two board members in July: Scott Mayer, counsel for Boeing, and James Murphy, a career NLRB attorney. These appointments, if approved by the Senate, would restore quorum to the agency’s board.

But a high-stakes ruling in August by an appeals court in the fifth circuit, which covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, has increased concern. Weighing into a case that stems from a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the appeals court suggested the plaintiffs will likely prevail on their arguments that the NLRB is unconstitutional – and maintained court orders blocking the agency from proceeding with enforcement against the affected companies litigate their constitutional challenges against the agency.

The decision “basically halted labor law enforcement”, claimed an NLRB field attorney. “If you are an employer and you don’t want to go to an unfair labor practice trial, if you don’t want a union to be certified at your workplace, you basically have the ability to keep that from happening just by pulling certain procedural levers.”

They added: “We put so much work and effort into investigating these cases, and really finding the meritorious ones, and pursuing them vigorously, only to have this outlier rightwing decision, from a court that increasingly is willing to be the rightwing activists in the judiciary.”

Until, or unless, the decision is reversed, “there’s nothing we can do”, the attorney said. “I personally have strong, meritorious cases that are just sitting, because they can’t go anywhere.”

Another attorney at the NLRB said it has been “difficult to not see anything happen” with cases that have circulated. “While we have been teeing up cases for when there is an eventual quorum, we cannot actively draft anything other than simple orders in cases we think are straightforward.”

While major cases gather dust, the number hitting in-trays across the NLRB reached its highest level in over a decade just before Trump’s return to office.

The majority of such unfair labor practice (ULP) cases are settled by agreement, rather than litigation. Only the most contentious cases, including when a decision by a regional NLRB director is challenged, are filed to an administrative judge. If this ruling is appealed, it goes to the board.

The agency’s workforce, which had already shrunk considerably, has declined by around 100 employees under Trump, according to estimates from the staff’s union and the NLRB.

Despite employee concerns about capacity, the NLRB’s 2026 budget request sought a reduction by $14m to the previous year. In the agency’s budget request, they eliminated a strategic goal of the NLRB to “improve public awareness” of its mission and activities.

In an interview with the Guardian, William Cowen, acting general counsel of the NLRB, and the agency’s highest-ranking official, disputed claims it has been “crippled” by the lack of a quorum, and cast the rollback of policies designed to strengthen workers’ rights as a matter of priorities.

Cowen, a veteran NLRB official promoted by Trump after the firing of Jennifer Abruzzo, who served under Joe Biden, said: “The loss of the quorum did not have a serious impact on what the agency could do.”

Asked what he would say to Whole Foods workers who are still waiting for almost a year on the status of their union, Cowen appeared to walk back his remarks. “I wasn’t saying it was unimportant that the board doesn’t have a quorum, and it is particularly important, especially to those people who have a case that’s waiting for the board’s quorum to decide,” he said. “That is not a good place to be in, because the board has to decide. My only point is that that’s less than 5% of all the cases that come through the front door.”

He also characterized rescissions of several Biden-era policies – including steps to improve compensation for workers found to have had their rights violated, and curtail non-compete agreements – as necessary, given the lack of resources at the agency. Announcing the move in February, Cowen had said: “The unfortunate truth is that if we attempt to accomplish everything, we risk accomplishing nothing.”

“In pursuing so many things all simultaneously, we overloaded our system,” he said. “We have a weird historic case intake, and as well as historic staffing lows. It’s so sort of high volume, low capacity. And so the combination of those two things put us into a situation where we had a serious backlog of cases, and it was taking significantly longer than is typical to process cases.”

He acknowledged the NLRB could use more staff, but likened the decisions he has made since taking charge of the agency to that of a family. “There is a reality … like any homeowner knows, or family knows … that you have a certain amount of money, and you can therefore do a certain amount of things, and you can’t always go to Disney World. You know with the resources you have.”

“Not that any of this is Disney World,” added Cowen. “It’s our challenge, as the managers of this agency, to be able to maintain operations with the resources we have.”

As far as Cowen’s concerned, the fifth circuit intervention – and the potential impact – is “far more challenging” than the lack of quorum. “We can’t have hearings in order to set cases up for the board to hear,” he said.

While Cowen argued the paralysis of the NLRB’s top court has had no “serious impact” on its ability to function, his direct predecessor is of a different view.

Without quorum at the board, Abruzzo warned Congress in June, “the issue is that there’s too many employers out there abusing the processes, and then pushing it to the board by appealing when a union wins an election”.

The appeal “then gets stuck”, she noted, “because there’s no quorum”.

Even when quorum is restored with Trump appointees, Ellen Dichner, former chief counsel to the NLRB chair, warned the agency is likely to rescind decisions issued under Biden , such as a ban on captive audience meetings held by employers to deter unionization.

“This is a very, very hostile climate for workers,” said Dichner. “What I think labor is seeing, and will continue to see, is a fundamental attack on workers’ rights, and the rights of workers to organize, and the ability of workers to achieve collective bargaining agreements.”

Some states have tried to fill in the void as the NLRB enforcement dwindles under Trump. New York and California passed laws this year – challenged by the NLRB – to grant state labor agencies authority to oversee private sector union elections and ULP charges.

“The current president is attempting to take a wrecking ball to public and private sector employees’ fundamental right to join a union and collectively bargain for fair wages, benefits and safe working conditions,” said California assemblymember Tina McKinnor. “California will not sit idly as its workers are systematically denied the right to organize due to employer intransigence or federal inaction.”

As Trump officials continue to bulldoze established norms, the supreme court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the NLRB; the firing of Wilcox; and a case involving Trump’s firing of former Federal Trade Commission commissioner Rebecca Slaughter that will determine the independence of federal agencies like the NLRB.

“The potential loss of independence at the agency is a huge pivot point for its operations,” said McFerran, the former NLRB chair, who expects the supreme court to “scale back or eviscerate” the NLRB’s independence. “If the agency does start operating in a fundamentally more politicized way, I think people will have to find other ways to get their labor disputes resolved, because they’ll lose trust in the board altogether.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

With the future of the US labor movement in the balance, workers like those in Philadelphia are waiting.

“Whole Foods has more than enough money and profit to be able to share that wealth with the workers,” said Dupree. “A union is the main way for us to get more of the profit of our labor.”