“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine warned in The Crisis, the powerful pamphlet he wrote when it looked like we might lose the Revolutionary War.
Paine’s historic words seem especially appropriate this Labor Day.
These are soul-trying times for men and women who treasure our democracy. For the first time in our history, our democracy is threatened by an American president who is an authoritarian wannabe at best, a would-be fascist at worst.
Not coincidentally, Donald Trump is also one of the most — if not the most — anti-union presidents in our history.
But here’s a fact:
Throughout history, democracies have always included strong, free trade unions.
So, this Labor Day, I’m reminded of Bill Londrigan’s 2023 farewell speech as longtime president of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO.
“How many times in the past have you heard us really talking about democracy and what it means?” Londrigan challenged delegates at the 2023 state convention. “We haven’t necessarily gone out and talked about what role we play in protecting democracy.”
Londrigan said free unions reflect a chant often heard at anti-Trump protests nationwide: “This is what democracy looks like.”
Chicken Comer
Those protests have included scores of union members like Jerry Sykes, an 82-year-old United Auto Workers retiree who lives in Marshall County.
He belongs to Four Rivers Indivisible, a deep western Kentucky branch of the national Indivisible organization that since January has sponsored 19 protests in Paducah, many of them focused on union-busting Republican Congressman James Comer, a Joe McCarthyesque Fox News star and top-tier Trump toady.
Last March, Four Rivers came up with a novel way to shame Comer into holding a town hall in Paducah. Five people in bright yellow chicken suits joined other protestors outside his local field office.
Sykes was one of the flock. He is ready to suit up again if duty calls, and he challenges his union brothers and sisters to join Indivisible or a similar group where they live.
The costumed quintet ruffled Comer’s feathers. He had his staff write a statement that said their boss “does not plan on holding therapy sessions for left-wing activists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
In other words, the congressman was too chicken to face his constituents.
Comer was in Paducah last Tuesday, chowing down at a local Chamber of Commerce “Public Policy Luncheon.”
Union-busting has long been a Chamber of Commerce “public policy.” The Paducah chamber joined the state Chamber of Commerce and some other local chambers in endorsing a Kentucky “right to work” law which the Republican supermajority legislature passed in 2017 and GOP Gov. Matt Bevin eagerly signed.
Comer, a right-to-work fan, has supported labor-backed legislation just 12 percent of the time he’s been in Congress, according to the latest AFL-CIO legislative report card.
I’d wager that hogs will fly and kids will stop shooting hoops in Kentucky before Comer agrees to a town hall.
The Nightmare Years
“One real way to look at what democracy looks like is to look at what democracy isn’t,” Londrigan proposed.
To that end, he read from William L. Shirer’s The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940, the journalist-historian’s first-hand account of how Adolf Hitler and the Nazis destroyed Germany’s fledgling democracy.
Of course, Trump vows that he is pro-worker. Hitler did, too.
“The idea that Donald Trump has ever, or will ever, care about working people is demonstrably false,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a press release. “For his entire time as president, he actively sought to roll back worker protections, wages, and the right to join a union at every level.”
Shirer wrote that soon after Hitler took power in 1933, he proclaimed the 1st of May — May Day — a national holiday “to honor German labor ‘throughout the century.’”
On May 2, he destroyed the unions. Nazi thugs beat up union leaders and tossed them into concentration camps. They shut down and ransacked local union offices.
Hitler replaced the free, independent unions with the Nazi puppet German Labor Front. Strikes were forbidden, and employers, many of whom helped bankroll the Nazis, gained dictatorial control over their workers.
“The single biggest act of union-busting in history.”
In time for Labor Day, Trump had a giant banner emblazoned with Trump’s face draped over the front of his anti-labor Department of Labor.
“American Workers Last” is more like it.
Trump is stepping up his holy war against federal employee unions. “Just ahead of Labor Day weekend, President Donald Trump escalated his attack on the federal workforce by trying to strip union rights from more federal employees,” HuffPost reported.
“Trump signed an executive order Thursday purporting to strip collective-bargaining abilities from workers at the National Weather Service, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other federal agencies, claiming a ‘national security’ exemption.
“The move builds on a sweeping executive order in March that aimed to end bargaining rights for an estimated 1 million federal workers under the same premise.”
Unions are suing, but Trump has the ultimate ace in the hole: a 6-3 rightwing, anti-union Supreme Court majority.
Shuler said Trump’s attack on federal government unions is “the single biggest act of union-busting in history.”
Maybe Trump figures “solidarity,” that old union byword, is dead and buried, or that private sector unions don’t care that he’s trying to wipe out federal employee unions as long as he leaves the private sector ones alone. But dozens of private sector unions — industrial, construction, and professional — have issued official statements of solidarity with the government unions Trump has in his crosshairs.
Progressives uniting
Meanwhile, almost 1,000 “Workers over Billionaires” protests were set to begin “in all 50 states ... this weekend as part of a Labor Day week of action organized by labor unions and advocacy groups in opposition to the Trump administration’s policies,” The Guardian online reported.
Those groups include Indivisible and its local organizations. Four Rivers Indivisible is marching in Paducah’s annual Labor Day parade.
Londrigan is also glad to see organized labor making common cause with groups like Indivisible. “It is absolutely necessary for us to work together and align ourselves with other progressive groups who share the same positions that we do on the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively, and to work with those groups in a united front against the Trump regime,” he said.
Concluded Londrigan: “People didn’t listen to the warnings about what this guy was going to do. He’s going along or following the playbook of the typical authoritarian by taking control of government agencies and making people beholden to him and not to the constitutional principles of our nation. These are very, very scary developments, but they are not unexpected.”
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