Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul says workers’ rights are at the top of his list of concerns about the incoming Trump administration and its policies. He’s not alone.
In an interview Wednesday, Raoul pointed to efforts that a Trump Labor Department might take to classify gig workers, such as delivery drivers for Uber or Doordash, as independent contractors, which would enable companies to avoid paying them overtime and giving them other benefits they would be entitled to if classified as employees.
“We’ve dealt with a Trump Department of Labor in the past that has been less friendly in their interpretation to protecting workers from misclassification,” he said.
Raoul was one of many Illinois elected officials, labor experts and labor leaders who expressed serious concerns regarding workers’ rights in the U.S. after Donald Trump’s election on Nov. 5 to a second term. Experts have widely considered President Joe Biden to be the most pro-labor president in modern history. Under his administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that enforces labor law throughout the U.S., has aggressively pursued pro-worker reforms, instituting changes that have made it easier for workers to form unions and that discourage employers from violating federal labor law.
Labor leaders, organizers and elected officials told the Tribune they expect the Trump administration to roll back many of those wins, but they vowed to keep fighting to protect workers’ rights in Illinois.
“The deck’s going to be stacked against us in a major way,” said Sean Allen, a business agent with the Bricklayers Administrative District Council 1.
“Trump’s election definitely is bad news for organized labor,” said Johnnie Kallas, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois’ School of Labor and Employment Relations. “I don’t know how much it’s going to mute the increase in activism we’ve seen over the last few years.”
But labor leaders also said Trump’s reelection has strengthened their resolve.
“The best defense is a good offense,” said Roberta Lynch, the executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, which over the last several years has notched union wins at some of Chicago’s foremost cultural institutions, including the Art Institute and the Shedd Aquarium.
Some of the greatest beneficiaries of recent labor board policy changes have been graduate students and undergraduate student workers, with more than 50,000 student workers joining unions over the last several years since the labor board rescinded a proposed rule made under the first Trump administration that prevented them from doing so.
Those students include graduate students at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, both of which voted overwhelmingly to unionize in the last two years.
At the U. of C., grad students first voted to unionize in 2017 but pulled out of the labor board process after the university challenged their eligibility to unionize, fearing an unfavorable decision from the Republican-controlled labor board. Under the Biden labor board, they filed for a union election again, won the election in a landslide, then ratified a first contract that increased the floor for graduate student stipends from $37,000 to $45,000, said Andy Archer, the union communications secretary.
If graduate workers’ rights to organize are rolled back, Archer said, “we would fight that very, very strongly.”
Carl Rosen, the president of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers — the national union that U. of C. and Northwestern grad students belong to — said it was too early to say if a Republican-controlled labor board would put a stop to new graduate student unions. In general, Rosen said, he would expect unions to rely less heavily on NLRB processes under the new administration, with a greater focus on other types of actions, including strikes for union recognition.
Organizers who work with immigrant workers throughout Illinois said they were particularly concerned that protections for undocumented workers would get slashed under the Trump administration, which has pledged to carry out an immigration crackdown, including mass deportations.
Under the Biden administration, undocumented workers who report alleged labor- and employment-related abuses can apply for protections that delay immigration enforcement against them while they litigate their cases. Labor organizers said those protections have made undocumented workers, who are often scared to report workplace abuses like wage theft or harassment for fear of immigration consequences, more likely to come forward.
“We’re counting on it being rolled back,” said Marcos Ceniceros, the executive director of the workers’ center Warehouse Workers for Justice. “That’s going to disappear.”
Labor leaders said Trump’s election is an opportunity for Illinois to beef up state and local level protections for workers and organized labor, which are already generally considered more robust than many states’ policies. Illinois is on track to have a $15 minimum wage statewide by January and in Chicago, the minimum wage is already higher. In 2022, Illinois residents passed the Workers Rights’ Amendment, which enshrines collective bargaining rights in the state’s constitution. And this year, the state legislature passed a law prohibiting employers from holding mandatory one-on-one anti-union meetings — often called captive audience meetings — with their employees.
“Everyone should just assume that very bad people are going to attack workers’ rights across the board,” said state Sen. Robert Peters, a Chicago Democrat who sponsored the Illinois bill and is the chair of the Labor Committee. “So let’s just assume that anything could be challenged.”
Tim Drea, the president of the Illinois AFL-CIO, said the organization would “double down” to protect workers’ rights in the state. “All options are on the table,” he said.
State Sen. Craig Wilcox, a Republican on the legislature’s labor committee, said it would not surprise him if state Democrats proposed labor legislation in response to concerns about Trump’s policies, and he said he would weigh those proposals as they come. But, it’s still early, he said.
Most major U.S. unions quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris when Biden dropped out of the race this summer. A significant exception to Harris’ wall of union support was the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which declined to endorse either candidate after releasing internal polling data that showed rank-and-file Teamsters favored Trump over Harris. Trump’s campaign touted the nonendorsement as a win.
Still, many Teamsters local organizations quickly endorsed Harris. That included Teamsters Joint Council 25, which represents two dozen locals and about 100,000 Teamsters throughout Illinois and northwest Indiana.
“We experienced four years under Donald Trump,” Pasquale Gianni, director of government affairs, told the Tribune at the time. “Dealing with the (National Labor Relations Board), for example, proved to be incredibly difficult under his anti-union appointees and policies.”
In Illinois and across the country, the Teamsters have set their sights on organizing Amazon delivery drivers, who are technically employed by third-party contractors when delivering Amazon packages. The union has described recent labor board determinations finding Amazon to be the joint employer of some third-party drivers as paving the way for the unionization of drivers nationwide. (Amazon maintains the drivers are not their employees.)
In Skokie, where Teamsters are organizing drivers at an Amazon warehouse, the union also hopes to take advantage of a 2023 labor board policy that can require companies found to have committed unfair labor practices to recognize and bargain with a union. The Washington Post has reported that the Trump administration plans to reverse that rule. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Kara Deniz, a spokesperson for the Teamsters international union, affirmed the union’s commitment to continued organizing at Amazon, saying, “Workers are not relying solely on a governmental process — they are taking matters into their own hands through direct action and with results.”
And beyond expected rollbacks to progressive labor policy are what U. of I. professor Kallas described as a “looming, existential” threat to the labor board as a whole. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has sued the agency twice in federal court in Texas in response to unfair labor practice charges against the company. SpaceX’s lawsuits seek to get the structure of the NLRB, which was established in 1935, declared unconstitutional.
A litany of other companies have stepped into the fray, arguing that the labor board is unconstitutional either in lawsuits or in labor board filings and hearings, including Amazon, Trader Joe’s and hometown hot dog giant Portillo’s.
“The courts are now a tool of the corporations and the Trump administration,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Even if federal agencies like the labor board don’t have their enforcement power shut down, they could be starved by underfunding, she said. Unions will need to rethink organizing, perhaps by focusing on public support and putting pressure on corporations directly rather than relying on government enforcement, she said.
Workers, she said, will keep trying to organize under Trump.
“The question is what’s going to happen when it becomes much, much harder.”
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