Happy Labor Day!
This is a day to thank working people for their contributions to our society. It’s a day to thank unions for providing a path to the middle class to help those who need pensions, decent wages, and job security.
Trump is celebrating Labor Day by banning unions at several federal agencies.
President Trump on Thursday signed a new executive order targeting unions at more than half a dozen agencies, again under the auspices of national security.
The edict, which was published within minutes of Trump’s proclamation marking Monday’s Labor Day holiday, appends a March edict that seeks to outlaw collective bargaining for two-thirds of the federal workforce, citing a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act allowing the president to exclude agencies from federal labor law if the law “cannot be applied to that agency or subdivision in a manner consistent with national security requirements.”
Thursday’s order would ban collective bargaining at the International Trade Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office within the Commerce Department; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service and the National Weather Service; as well as NASA and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. It states that all these agencies “have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative or national security work.”
Matt Biggs, national president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, whose union represents a portion of NASA’s workforce along with the American Federation of Government Employees, suggested that the administration’s targeting of NASA—IFPTE’s largest union—was in retaliation for its own lawsuit challenging the Spring iteration of the executive order, filed last month.
“It’s not surprising, sadly,” Biggs said. “What is surprising is that on the eve of Labor Day weekend, when workers are to be celebrated, the Trump administration has doubled down on being the most anti-labor, anti-worker administration in U.S. history. We will continue to fight in the courts, on the Hill and at the grassroots levels against this.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Happy Labor Day
To the great champion of labor whom
Cordially invites us to her blog living room.
Los Angeles is terrifically hot today;
I don my Red4Ed beanie anyway,
Feeling union strong, brothers and sisters, powerful strong!
In the last few days heading into the Labor Day weekend, the president (R) of the United States signed an executive order outlawing much federal collective bargaining — and the governor (D) of California torpedoed a bill that would have granted delivery drivers the right to form a union. The week before that, Cambridge added ‘broligarch’ to the dictionary. Along with skibidi. And just to add an uber lyft to the mood in my tech of the woods, the superintendent of LAUSD, concurrently getting the district sued for billions by giving sensitive, private student and employee data to multiple hackers, is once again driving deep austerity cuts during a budget surplus. I expect to be on strike again this winter, like I seem to be every three years when superintendents require an independent arbiter to get them to admit they’re lying about the budget to end a labor action.
I’ve navigated these labor fight waters before, so to tell the truth, I’m looking forward to going on strike this time. I look forward to being onboard the big, red, union ironclad. We need to be united again. Happy Labor Day. Right now, I feel like I’m overboard, swimming among the breakers and beams of a wreckage (D). I am alone on the Left Coast. I long to walk the line.
I say this because tech broligarchs have infiltrated education with Pearsonalized learning. They’ve weakened the teaching profession so much that I feel like an outcast for teaching instead of allowing myself to be replaced by iReady and IXL. I’m surrounded constantly by dupes and by invertebrates afraid to tell the emperor bro he has no cloths. My concerns were well articulated in The Guardian this morning: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/01/big-tech-classroom-parents-education. Please do read. And thank you for what you do.
When we fight, we win!
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Met a guy from Illinois this weekend. He grew up in a caterpillar town with a union father and recalls the long and bitter strike that preceded the end of the halcyon days that preceded the American rust belt. His perception of the strike was that the fat company and the fat union leaders dug in so that only people like his father suffered under the tiny strike wage.
This story may not be true. But it is a narrative I have heard.
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