When I am not writing, talking, or interviewing organizers and others about worker power, I spend a lot of time in discussions about workforce development. This is a broad category of activities that includes finding the best ways to help workers acquire the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in jobs. The people with whom I speak in this world generally agree that most adults don’t learn the way we were taught in school. Certainly, some working adults return to school to earn degrees or credentials. Yet, after high school or college (wherever they ended their formal education), most adults’ learning stops being about textbooks and lectures. It becomes experiential. We learn by doing, by watching, by living.
Right now, in the chaotic and disturbing first few months of a second Donald Trump presidency, working people are learning some hard, essential truths—about power, government, and other institutions, and about who really stands with them when it counts.
These lessons are not theoretical or abstract. They are as real as a car with a tariff-bloated price tag, a denied Medicaid claim, or a layoff notice. Working people are experts in their own lived experiences. Working people pay close attention — not to political theater, but to the material facts of their lives. The bell has not yet rung, so class has not adjourned just yet. But the lessons working adults are learning now could shape the future of worker power in America for many years to come.
Lesson One: Only Solidarity Stands Strong, Particularly When the Law Wobbles
One of the most powerful and painful realizations hitting working people today is that, now that push has come to shove, the institutions we have been taught to trust, like the courts and our Constitution, too often fail to protect the rights and lives of ordinary people. Some individual judges have shown courage. Too many have not. A few have called out the Trump Administration’s open contempt for the rule of law, although there have been no real consequences yet. At this stage, the most we can say is that law’s ability to defend American democracy and our Constitution remains uncertain.
By contrast, unions and worker power are showing up.
In the early months after Trump’s return to the White House, we’ve seen a ferocious assault on working families and the government programs enacted over the course of decades that support them. Trump has attacked, among other things, Social Security, Medicaid, public education, consumer protection, and labor rights enforcement — some of the government’s cornerstones of economic dignity, opportunity, and stability for tens of millions of Americans. In every one of these fights, unions are leading the resistance. Not the courts. Not CEOs (who seem to be too consumed with sucking up to power and lobbying for tax cuts). Not the media. Not the political elite and elected officials. Unions, plain and simple.
To their credit, and to be entirely fair, some not-for-profit organizations, like Democracy Forward and the American Civil Liberties Union, are in the fight, as well. Some progressive politicians have been speaking at protests and using social media to amplify opposition messages. A few elected officials are demanding information and using their public profiles to bring attention to the damage being done. Democratic attorneys general have brought litigation. So, unions are not entirely alone.
Nonetheless, union members — federal employees, state and local government employees, teachers, nurses, building trades workers, and many others — are organizing, marching, protesting, litigating, and fighting back. They’re deploying the quintessential labor movement strategy — the power of collective action — not only to defend themselves, but to stand up for the broader working class. For example, union members are not the only working people who benefit from the protections provided by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), but a union brought the lawsuit challenging Trump’s efforts to shut down that important agency. Unions are showing once again that, especially in times when democratic institutions and norms seem shaky, solidarity is not just a slogan. It’s the surest safeguard for democracy, fairness, and justice.
Working people will learn from this experience, just as they learned about the value of worker power and worker activism from the strike surge that occurred in 2022 and 2023. When billionaire bosses beat up on working people, as they are now, working people have watched the law bends to their whims. The lesson of 2025 is that workers who stand together can resist that bend — and, sometimes, even straighten the curve.
Lesson Two: Even a Strong Economy Can Be Kneecapped by Political Incompetence
Working people already knew from their past experiences that the U.S. economy is not some invincible autonomous vehicle cruising ever forward. It can work, although very often not in their best interests, but it also can break down. Another lesson that working people are learning in 2025 is that the economy can be broken by bad leadership, usually with working people paying the highest price.
Trump inherited an economy that, while imperfect, was reasonably strong: solid growth, low unemployment, rising productivity, and steady progress on inflation. Massive public investments helped to expand or create industries that provide good-quality jobs: renewable energy, green transportation (including electric vehicles), semiconductors, construction, and manufacturing. These economic results were not produced by magic. After an economically disastrous global pandemic, these outcomes were achieved through years of sound, targeted, worker-centered industrial and trade policies, reasonable (if not always timely) monetary policy, and a measure of political stability.
Undeniably, inflation took too big a bite out of workers’ paychecks after the pandemic recession. There’s a powerful argument that voters’ sour views of the economy in the 2024 election were largely about too-high prices and wages that did not keep up. Working-class voters were listening when Trump promised during the 2024 campaign to bring down those prices and create better jobs. He leaned heavily on his image as an economic manager, which is more a product of the marketing around The Apprentice television show than Trump’s real-world track record.
Yet, in 2025, President Trump has shown zero interest in the policies and governmental mechanics of helping working people. There is no plan to bring down prices. He is bashing unions and shutting down worker protection agencies. He is eliminating or radically downsizing programs that serve working people. His principal focus is making permanent his own tax cuts for the wealthy and wealthy corporations rather than investing in high-quality jobs that will grow the middle class.
Where Trump has acted, he has taken a stable and solid economy and smashed it in the head with a 2-by-4.
By ZapTheDingbat, CC BY 2.0.
Trump’s unnecessary trade wars with our closest allies tanked relationships, invited retaliation, and hurt American exporters, farmers, and manufacturers. His immigration policy has undermined tourism and business travel, at the same time costing America tens of thousands of workers who contribute to economic growth and prosperity. The result has been shattered consumer and business confidence and stock markets in a tailspin.
Working families know it is only a matter of time before Trump’s tariffs drive up prices substantially with direct effects multiplied by corporate America’s inevitable profit-grubbing. Businesses’ uncertainty about supply chains and markets in which they can sell their goods has already begun to slow economic activity. Perhaps feeling that he had not yet done enough damage to the American economy, Trump has thrown public tantrums that included threats to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Stock and debt markets responded as though they had been kicked in the groin. Around the world, and at home, investors are beginning to question for the first time since World War II whether the United States is a safe place to invest. If an enemy wanted to supplant America as the world’s economic leader, it would have been hard to craft a better approach.
Working people have been told for years that presidents do not have the tools to influence the economy much. They have been told recessions and booms are driven by business cycles. But working adults lived through the 2008 crash. They saw the effects of Wall Street criminality and government’s regulatory failure. Then, they lived through the COVID-19 recession — a crisis caused by a pandemic, but worsened by a gross leadership failure (guess who?). Now, they’re watching one man in the White House threaten to undo years of progress to prove an unprovable, ideologically-driven economic theory. The lesson for working people is clear: the wrong captain can sink even a well-constructed ship.
Organizing with your co-workers will not immediately stop a politician from crashing the economic car into a tree. But organizing a union can provide badly needed protections when an incompetent leader grabs the wheel. Working people are seeing that in real time in 2025. Unions are fighting for job security, including protecting their members and others against unnecessary and unfair layoffs. They are enforcing collective bargaining agreements they negotiated with employers. They are lobbying government to protect job-creating investments like the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflations Reduction Act, and the Chips and Sciences Act. And they are protecting the integrity of working people’s information that is being mined by Elon Musk’s minions. Working people are learning, yet again, who is on their side.
Lesson Three: When People Tell You Who They Are — Listen
There’s no excuse for surprise any longer. Trump has always been anti-union. He’s always looked down on workers, whether it was through wage theft, contract fraud, and otherwise refusing to pay people what they were owed. He built a public image on a TV show that fetishized firing people, and somehow convinced millions that he was a master businessman.
stock.adobe.com by Cagkan
Now, back in the White House, he’s showing that same contempt for working people on a national scale. When Trump opens his mouth about workers, he can scarcely hide his feelings. His critique of federal employees as lazy, unnecessary, and interested only in themselves directly contradicts my experiences working with federal employees during 12 years in the White House and the U.S. Department of Labor. It’s also rife with lies.
Federal employees are patriots dedicated to the missions of their departments and agencies. Most could earn a great deal more working in the private sector, but they want to serve. They want to contribute to a better country. They care about their fellow Americans. Neither ideology nor greed drive their decisions. Of course, these are all personal characteristics that Donald Trump either cannot understand or disdains.
When a man repeatedly expresses opposition to unions, when he empowers union-busting corporations, when he fires public servants to generate money that will fund tax cuts for the wealthy, when he shuts down the operations of the agency charged with protecting workers’ labor rights, working people have every right — and every reason — to believe him. Despite the way some working class Americans voted in 2024, Trump is no friend of working people.
Again, working people are paying attention and learning from this experience. They heard Trump’s billionaire Secretary of Commerce loud and clear when he made this comment about the grave risk that interference by Elon Musk and his mis-named Department of Government Efficiency could deprive millions of Americans of their monthly Social Security checks:
Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.
Twenty-two million Americans are lifted out of poverty by their Social Security checks. Among Social Security beneficiaries aged 65 or older, 39% of men and 44% of women receive 50% or more of their income from Social Security. In this same group, 12% of men and 15% of women rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income. Simply, America’s retired workers desperately need their Social Security checks. Those checks are their repayment for decades of contributions taken from their paychecks to the Social Security Trust Fund. They are owed that money and they need it. Most do not have a billionaire son-in-law to float them a loan if the checks do not arrive.
Conclusion
The Trump presidency is many things. A warning. A threat. A massive and deadly pile-up on the interstate. But for working people, it’s also a lesson.
Powerful people and interests have long banked on the idea that working people would tune out. The noise of politics would drown out the real-world consequences of policy. But that’s not what’s happening now. Working adults of all kinds are watching, listening, and learning.
They’re seeing how unions have become the firewall against corporate overreach and authoritarian overkill. They’re seeing how economic stability can evaporate under the weight of impulsive, ideological governance and that only workers’ own power can create greater stability for them and their families. And they’re seeing—some for the first time, others all over again—that when a leader shows you who he is, you’d better believe him, regardless of who he appoints to be his Secretary of Labor or how many non-union auto workers he rallies with.
This isn’t just a political moment. It’s an educational one. For working people, the education is not being delivered from behind a lectern in a classroom. It’s happening in paychecks, grocery store aisles, union meetings, local barroom conversations, and protests and picket lines. The lesson is clear: No one is coming to save working people but working people themselves—standing together, fighting smart, and refusing to forget what they have learned.
Acquiring knowledge is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Acting on that knowledge — or organizing using that knowledge — matters most.
