Unions and worker advocates have been fighting, and winning a few battles in court, but the upheaval is relentless. On Monday, the Greater Boston Labor Council is holding its first Labor Day parade as part of a national “Workers Over Billionaires” event, with more than 1,000 rallies and protests planned across the country.
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The vibe, said Boston labor council president Darlene Lombos, will be “both festive and militant.”
Working class people have felt anxious and alienated for a while, said Chrissy Lynch, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, which represents unions around the state. The Democratic and Republican parties have both prioritized corporations over workers, she said, leading voters to elect the person who promised to blow things up. And he has.
“The things we celebrate every Labor Day are being hacked away at right now by the federal government,” Lynch said.
The White House pushed back against assertions that workers’ rights were under attack, noting that deportations are creating job opportunities for native-born Americans and that blue-collar wages are rising faster than they have in decades — a trend that started in 2019.
“President Trump has championed an agenda that puts the American worker first,” spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, Republicans are once again the party of the American worker.”
But some workers don’t see it that way.
Claire Bergstresser, 32, was hired out of law school to investigate discrimination claims for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and fired on Valentine’s Day, one of at least roughly 200,000 federal workers who have lost or left their jobs in the last eight months. The Boston office where Bergstresser used to work is now short-staffed, she said, and her former co-workers have “more hoops they have to jump through,” with more restrictive guidelines limiting the kinds of fair housing claims that can be processed.
Bergstresser started looking for a job in January when she found out about cuts on the horizon, knowing as a wheelchair user she’d need time to find the right fit. It took her six months to land a position at Greater Boston Legal Services — making $5,000 a year less.
The vast reduction in the federal workforce is part of the Trump administration’s “abandonment” of its larger responsibilities to the American people, said Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School.
“Each of those workers represents the ability of the government to make sure that the government works for everybody,” she said. “It all adds up to a hostility to the dignity of the working class in this country that I find shocking.”
The labor force has lost 37,000 manufacturing jobs since sweeping tariffs were announced in April, and pulling back federal funds for clean energy projects could put thousands more out of work. When the July jobs report showed a softening labor market, Trump’s response was to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics responsible for the data.
The slide appears to be steepening. One in five chief human resource officers anticipates pulling back hiring over the next six months, according to The Conference Board, a nonprofit business think tank in New York, almost double the share who expected to do so a year ago. In Massachusetts, employer payrolls are up just 0.2 percent from a year ago as companies grapple with tariffs, federal attacks on green technology and higher education, and cuts to health care spending and medical research.
The number of workers in the US labor force has declined for the past three consecutive months, potentially slowing growth. This decrease has been widely attributed to the immigration crackdown, which is instilling fear at construction sites, cannabis farms, laundry facilities, and other workplaces around the country.
In Massachusetts, 148,000 jobs could be lost if the administration carries out its intention to deport 4 million people over four years, according to the Economic Policy Institute, as employers grapple with a reduced labor force and struggle to stay open.
People of color tend to have jobs that are more vulnerable to rolled-back regulations, starting with the end of federal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on Trump’s first day in office, said Saqib Bhatti, executive director of Action Center on Race and the Economy, a left-leaning social justice nonprofit in Chicago. The administration has blamed Medicaid fraud on undocumented immigrants, for example, he said, to justify Medicaid reductions across the board.
“It makes it easier to do bad things to all working-class people if you can convince them that this is primarily going to hit Black and brown folks,” he said.
Trump has also proposed getting rid of federal minimum wage protections for 3.7 million domestic workers, reduced the allowable minimum wage for federal contractors, and halted a proposal requiring companies to pay workers with disabilities at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
In many states, the minimum wage has greatly increased in recent years. In Massachusetts, it’s $15 an hour, with proposed legislation to raise it to $20.
Unions have also taken a significant hit this year. The Trump administration fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board, making it unable to issue decisions, and ended collective bargaining rights for more than 1 million federal workers in March — “by far the largest single action of union-busting in American history,” according to Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Even workplace safety regulations are under fire, as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposes loosening requirements that limit workers’ exposure to dangerous substances such as lead and asbestos.
Artificial intelligence is another major worry for workers, and it’s already having a major impact on entry-level jobs, according to Stanford University researchers. Among workers ages 22 to 25 in “AI-exposed” occupations, employment declined 13 percent since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, even as older employees and those in other fields remained stable or grew.
The Labor Day actions Monday are focused on challenging the corporate greed driving these kinds of technology changes, said Lombos, of the Greater Boston Labor Council. Waymo driverless cars being tested in Boston, for instance, could put Uber and Lyft drivers out of work, she said.
“We’re fighting for our humanity here,” she said.
AI-powered checkout machines are a major concern for Aramark employees at Fenway Park who went on strike for three days in July. These machines threaten wages and job security because fewer workers are needed to staff concession stands, said Madeline Rivera, 47, who has worked at Fenway for 13 years.
“All they’re thinking about are dollar signs,” she said.
Aramark said it addressed concerns about hours and tips in its bargaining proposal with the union.
If the economy goes into a recession with Trump in the White House, said Block, at Harvard Law School, things will only get worse.
“As bad as things are for workers this Labor Day,” she said, “what’s that conversation going to be a year from now?”
This story was produced by the Globe’s Money, Power, Inequality team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston. You can sign up for the newsletter here.
Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston.
