During his so-called “Liberation Day” announcement last week, Donald Trump claimed that working class voters — and union members specifically — are flocking to MAGA because Trump is building “an entirely different country, and it’s going to be fantastic for the workers.” That would be easier to believe if he hadn’t tried to terminate the majority of federal collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) — stripping rights from hundreds of thousands of unionized public servants, including a disproportionately high number of disabled workers.

Let’s be clear: Trump’s attempt to dismantle federal CBAs constitutes an unprecedented attack on the labor movement. Over a million union members are federal workers, an estimated three-quarters of whom would be affected by the Trump regime’s CBA terminations. And in the US, federal workers make up an outsized share of the labor movement; 7.4 percent of all union members work for the federal government, which employs just 2.9 percent of all workers. If the courts let this stand, it will strip union representation from more than one in every twenty union members nationwide. This is a direct, historic hit to the labor movement’s core at a time when said movement is already struggling to maintain membership density. Trump’s order makes Ronald Reagan’s catastrophic firing of the air traffic controllers look like a mere blip in comparison.

Trump’s union busting also poses an existential threat to disabled workers, who are overrepresented in the federal workforce — where disabled workers make up 6.6 percent of workers, compared to 5.2 percent of the workforce as a whole — and especially overrepresented among federal union members (Figure 1). Nearly 30 percent of disabled federal workers are union members — far higher than the just over 5 percent unionization rate among disabled workers in the private sector. Federal workers with disabilities are also more likely to be union members than their coworkers without disabilities. Altogether, 12.3 percent of disabled union members in the US work for the federal government. Even after controlling for sector, union membership confers substantial advantages for disabled workers, so eliminating a significant source of union jobs is especially devastating for this group. Union membership and federal work both confer critical benefits for disabled workers — protections against discrimination, access to accommodations, job security — and Trump is trying to tear those protections away.

Figure 1

Trump’s Plan Was Clear From the Start

The Trump regime telegraphed its contempt for both federal CBAs and disabled workers early on. A Day One executive order mandating a sweeping return to in-person work foreshadowed the regime’s broader and more devastating attacks. After unions contested the order, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued an absurd memo that characterized CBA provisions relating to remote work as unlawful infringements on “management rights.” In other words, the Trump regime maintained that parts of ratified CBAs could simply be ignored.

For many disabled workers, these flexible arrangements weren’t perks — they were lifelines. Yet the insistence that federal workers crowd back into underequipped federal offices dovetails nicely with the Trump regime’s false assertions that the COVID-19 pandemic is over and that COVID is not a threat. The World Health Organization continues to characterize COVID-19 as a pandemic (albeit not an emergency), and COVID-19 remains a leading cause of death and disability.

Trump has launched a parallel assault on public health infrastructure, cutting programs on which disabled workers rely — and that help prevent disability in the first place. The Department of Health and Human Services, echoing the regime’s COVID denialism, is gutting public health departments, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and critical health research. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) — a key player in protecting workers — lost over a third of its staff in the latest round of CDC layoffs, despite making up just a tenth of the agency. This is the agency that ensures that the respirators Trump would sooner ban actually protect as intended. The Trump regime’s cuts to university research funding also stand to impact disabled union members disproportionately. Disabled workers at colleges and universities are more likely to be union members than both their nondisabled colleagues and disabled workers in other industries (Figure 2).

Figure 2

This isn’t about fiscal restraint. It’s an ideological war on the people who make government work — and the most vulnerable when it doesn’t. If Trump gets his way, we’re looking at a future with fewer unions, fewer disabled union members, fewer protections, and more preventable disability. Disabled workers are often the canaries in the coal mine when labor rights erode. And right now, that coal mine is collapsing.

The good news, though, is that labor can punch back. Worker rights, like rights for those with disabilities, were fought for and won, not given. Unions are not a form of charity bestowed by employers. They are a form of power taken by employees. It’s well past time for today’s labor unions to rediscover their forebearers’ militancy and collectively meet today’s challenges with the ferocity they require. To do otherwise is to concede more power to a handful of oligarchs who see workers as disposable. The future of labor, disability, and US democracy depends on making it impossible for them to forget how indispensable we are.