The Gilded Age robber baron Jay Gould is said to have bragged, “I can hire half of the working class to shoot the other half.” The robber barons of our own age, the billionaires who run the Trump administration, are increasingly embracing violence and repression as they seek to drive more money and power into their own hands and silence any criticism of their exploitation.
Our labor movement knows from long experience that crackdowns on immigrants always drive down wages for everyone, as they create a group of workers afraid to speak up for fair wages or their rights as workers. Increasingly militaristic ICE raids, and Trump’s efforts to send the national guard into cities where people are protesting them, are sending an even more chilling message to all working people: if you stand up for your rights, you run the risk of violent repression.
In addition to urban areas, the Trump administration is attacking two institutions critical to democracy: higher education and the media. The so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which has been denounced by UE’s Higher Education Conference Board, is a blatant attempt to blackmail colleges and universities into carrying out the administration’s political agenda. Meanwhile, Trump has sought to reshape American media to prevent any negative stories about the economy, violations of civil liberties, or government corruption from reaching the American people, using both legal threats and the deep pockets of billionaires eager to control the media. CBS has capitulated to this campaign by installing conservative commentator Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief, and TikTok is poised to be taken over by a group of investors including right-wing media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison.
It is not a coincidence that the Trump administration is ramping up repression as working people are feeling increased economic pain. Seventy-four percent of respondents to a recent poll reported that their monthly household costs have increased by at least $100 over the past year and car repossessions are on the rise, an indication that increasing numbers of working people are unable to make ends meet. The Trump administration has cut back or eliminated virtually every government department that protects workers, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Department of Labor, and the National Labor Relations Board. They have also directed government agencies to modify or stop producing reports on economic indicators like unemployment or inflation that might show the economy in a bad light.
While working people are struggling to make ends meet, corporations with ties to Trump are getting massive no-bid contracts to carry out his agenda. The $915 million contract given to Salus Worldwide Solutions to run a “self-deportation” program, an apparent insider deal for a company with virtual no contracting experience, is likely just the tip of the iceberg — but without a robust, independent media doing investigative reporting, we may never know the extent of the graft and corruption that is happening.
The combination of stagnating wages, high inflation, and a government more interested in repression and corruption than in meeting the needs of its people is a recipe for economic disaster. Financial markets are already worried about recent collapses in the auto lending industry, the third-largest consumer credit market, which are largely attributable to the expansion of the same kind of sub-prime lending that brought down the housing market — and then the broader economy — in 2008. If this happens, working people will once again be stuck with the bill — unless we are organized to fight to make the wealthy pay their fair share.
The historic turnout at last weekend’s “No Kings” protests, when seven million people took to the streets at more than 2,500 events nationwide, demonstrate that the American people will not take government repression lying down. However, unions and working-class organizations need to do more, both by connecting the fight for democracy with the fight for economic justice, and by taking the fight into the workplace with strikes and other forms of disruption if needed, in order to convince corporations and the billionaires that the price of these continued attacks is too high to sustain.
We unequivocally condemn the ongoing ICE raids against immigrant workers and families, and the use of the National Guard — working people who signed up to help their country, not to police their fellow workers — to suppress protests. We join our higher education locals in rejecting the administration’s higher education compact, and demand that university leaders do the same. Most importantly, we urge all working people to focus on who is profiting from all of the violence and repression, and to unite as a working class to demand that the government put the needs of workers over the greed of billionaires.
Carl Rosen
General President
Andrew Dinkelaker
Secretary-Treasurer
Mark Meinster
Director of Organization