Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Oregon’s first Republican congresswoman and Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Labor, was raised in California by a Mexican American Teamster. Her father, Richard Chavez, who worked at a Safeway milk plant in the Central Valley, reportedly leaned on his union card to help his daughter last year, when she was seeking labor endorsements in a bid for reëlection. The Portland-area Teamsters council was persuaded to pledge its support, the first time it had backed a Republican for Congress in more than twenty years. Chavez-DeRemer lost that race, then quickly pivoted to a new campaign—for Labor Secretary. She was put forward by Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, who described her as “the exact type of champion for the American worker that Republicans should get behind if they are serious about becoming the working-class party.” O’Brien identifies as a Democrat but gave a speech on behalf of the labor movement at last year’s Republican National Convention. Trump, in his first term, had established a national council “for empowering American workers,” and promised in his second Inaugural Address to fix “our trade system to protect American workers and families.” His policy record is something else entirely; the A.F.L.-C.I.O. union federation has described it as “catastrophic and devastating.” He has opposed increases in the minimum wage and favored right-to-work laws that make it difficult for unions to operate. He cut public health care and used tax cuts to redistribute more than a trillion dollars to the richest Americans.
Chavez-DeRemer generally stuck with the G.O.P. during her two years in Congress, but diverged in telling ways: by co-sponsoring both the PRO Act, a bill strongly associated with Joe Biden and the Democrats, which would make it much easier to form a union, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would guarantee the right to organize for state employees. By nominating her, “the Administration is trying to deliver on the idea of the conservative labor movement,” Abigail Ball, the executive director of American Compass, a conservative economics think tank, told me. Vice-President J. D. Vance has lamented the country’s decline in union membership and vowed to “protect as many workers’ jobs as possible.” Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, of Pennsylvania, who just this week paid tribute to the “millions of hardworking public servants” in the federal workforce, has a voting history that’s far more labor-friendly than Chavez-DeRemer’s, according to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. And the Missouri senator Josh Hawley has presented himself as a guardian of the American working class, though often in nativist terms, against the threat of “illegal aliens newly authorized to work.”
If, at least in recent history, the labor movement has situated itself within a progressive coalition, some unionists may now be breaking out, to get what they can from the Republicans. Many workers voted MAGA—sixty per cent of Teamsters wanted the union to endorse Trump—and expect the G.O.P. to follow through on its promises. According to Mike Ingrao, a former A.F.L.-C.I.O. official who worked as a labor consultant for Chavez-DeRemer, it’s important for the trade-union movement not “to be tied exclusively to any party.”
Next week, Chavez-DeRemer will appear before the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) on her way to a full Senate vote. If confirmed, she will lead a large agency whose two dozen sub-agencies enforce more than a hundred and eighty laws on wages and overtime, child labor, health and safety, plant closures, and pensions, affecting a hundred and sixty-five million workers. The loudest opposition to her nomination so far comes from the HELP committee member Rand Paul, the junior Republican senator from Kentucky, who said that he would vote against her, based on her advocacy of the PRO Act. (Other Republicans have publicly criticized her views, too.) Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of the committee, was measured in his assessment of her independence. “Do I think that this Secretary of Labor, or any Secretary of Labor, will have enormous power?” he told me. “She will not.”
So far, Chavez-DeRemer has been a faithful, if vague, messenger for Trump, promising to “Make America Work Again” and to find “pragmatic solutions to support hardworking Americans.” (Her social-media posts are almost all we have to go on, since she isn’t speaking to the press.) Yet the first weeks of Trump’s second term—a blizzard of attacks on federal employees, labor-related agencies, immigrant workers, and jobs programs—have shown the fundamental contradiction of having “a pro-union supporter of the PRO Act nominated by an Administration that has Elon Musk at the helm,” Judy Conti, the director of government affairs at the National Employment Law Project, told me. “I don’t know how much authority she is going to have to do good things for workers, or whether she is going to enact Elon Musk’s agenda.”
Officials with Musk’s DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (and a riff on the Shiba Inu-themed cryptocurrency), showed up at D.O.L. headquarters last week, prompting a demonstration outside the building by unions and worker activists. From a crowd of dark puffer coats and beanies rose signs in bright red: “STOP THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER,” “NOBODY ELECTED MUSK.” The A.F.L.-C.I.O. announced a new department of its own, the Department of People Who Work for a Living, under the tagline, “If Elon Musk can make up his own government department, so can workers.” It also sued to stop DOGE from accessing D.O.L. files, which contain confidential employee records and complaints, including against Musk’s businesses. (Trump’s own businesses have been accused of the kinds of wage and overtime theft that the agency polices.)
Even before DOGE arrived, the Labor Department—which has around fourteen thousand employees and a budget of about fourteen billion dollars—had been convulsed by the same executive orders that have riled the entire federal bureaucracy. Programs and contracts suspected of furthering racial “equity” or “gender ideology” were threatened with possible termination; employees working on diversity and nondiscrimination efforts, which often overlap with civil-rights enforcement, were put on administrative leave; nearly all employees were pressured to resign and seek “higher productivity” positions in the private sector. (Lawsuits have been filed over most of these actions.) In the first Trump Administration, a D.O.L. employee told me, “There weren’t a lot of changes coming from executive orders—it was more through agency heads that he had appointed. This time, his orders are affecting us very directly and very immediately.” I asked whether Chavez-DeRemer might offer some protection to the agency’s rank and file. “I want to be cautiously optimistic,” the employee said. “At the same time, I see it like the other Cabinet appointees, where they’re just in lockstep with Trump. She may look good on paper, but that might be switched around once she gets her marching orders.”
One of Trump’s first executive orders, titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” hit the D.O.L. with particular force. That order rescinded an earlier one, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson as an extension of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that required all contractors receiving federal funds to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.” This was not “affirmative action” of the kind struck down at colleges and universities by the Supreme Court. It simply meant that contractors should go a step beyond following anti-discrimination laws, by monitoring patterns in hiring and promotions, submitting compliance reports, and coöperating with occasional audits performed by the D.O.L. This insured that entities bound by the order, accounting for more than a fifth of the U.S. workforce, were a lot more diverse than they might otherwise be. As just one indication, Jenny Yang, who previously led the sub-agency that enforces equal opportunity in contracting, told me that, in the past decade, D.O.L. audits recovered nearly a hundred million dollars owed to women who had been victims of discrimination. Trump now asserts that this extension of the Civil Rights Act itself violates civil rights.
The D.O.L. has notified “diverse” contractors that their funding is under review. These include organizations and schools that run congressionally mandated job-training programs in blue-collar industries Trump has promised to revive. Chicago Women in Trades, which prepares women for union construction jobs, is facing the potential disappearance of some two million dollars in federal training contracts—half its annual budget—presumably because of its focus on gender. “What is illegal about training Americans and allowing them to support their families?” Jayne Vellinga, the group’s executive director, asked. Rachel Micah-Jones, whose labor-rights group, Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, is the recipient of a D.O.L. grant to combat gender-based discrimination and harassment, told me, “I certainly didn’t expect workplace issues to be controversial. Worker education would seem to be in line with what the new Administration has been saying.” Late last month, she cancelled a know-your-rights training for women in poultry- and seafood-processing plants.
By the time Trump was sworn in, conservative advocacy groups were already challenging other policies pushed by Biden’s D.O.L.: expanded overtime pay, high-temperature standards (a lethal concern exacerbated by global warming), and stringent criteria for classifying someone as an independent contractor rather than an employee. The Trump Administration is expected to abandon those rules and many others. This type of pendulum swing is typical when a new party takes the White House. What’s shocking, and probably unconstitutional, are Musk’s efforts to infiltrate and hollow out the D.O.L.—as he has already started to do at the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management, U.S.A.I.D., and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Trump has given DOGE permission to do what it wants with “just about” every part of the federal government. “I will pick out a target,” Trump explained, “and I say, ‘Go in.’ ”
In Chavez-DeRemer’s campaign for reëlection last year, she received a large number of local union endorsements, especially from among the building trades, whose members tend to vote Republican. (Janelle Bynum, the Democrat who defeated her, was backed by service unions, which boast bigger memberships.) Chavez-DeRemer had joined the picket lines of striking grocery-store workers and lent her support to UPS drivers in collective bargaining. Before serving in Congress, she had been the mayor of Happy Valley, a well-to-do suburb of Portland, and a partner in her husband’s anesthesiology business. “For the longest time,” she told Oregon Public Broadcasting, “people probably didn’t even know what my party was, because I just wanted to represent the people and the concerns that they had for things that happened in front of their noses. . . . They cared about their streets and safety. They cared about good jobs.”
Whatever a Republican pro-labor platform might be, it surely doesn’t include what Trump has done since last month. He fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board, an independent agency that’s now deprived of quorum and cannot rule on disputes between unionized workers and employers. He did the same thing at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, another independent agency that enforces workplace statutes. He also cut off billions in energy and infrastructure spending—and the jobs, many in red states, that go along with it—in an attempt to unwind Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and to achieve his goal of “Terminating the Green New Deal.”
Perhaps Trump’s most central theme on the campaign trail was to rid the country of “illegal aliens.” This promise is now being demonstrated through made-for-TV raids that have paralyzed workplaces and neighborhoods populated by undocumented and temporary laborers. The Administration has strategically cleaved immigration from labor, though the two issues are inseparable. In 2023, foreign-born workers made up nearly twenty per cent of the country’s civilian labor force, and were more likely to do jobs in construction, transportation, and the service sector than workers born in the U.S. About five per cent of the labor force consists of undocumented immigrants—workers who lack permission to work. Trump’s refusal to see them as workers—or, in many cases, as human beings—reveals the selectivity of his labor agenda. “Right now, any undocumented person working for a company, all the boss has to do is say, ‘You work at this wage’ or ‘You do what I tell you to do, or else we’re calling up ICE,’ ” Senator Sanders told me. “Above and beyond worker rights, if Trump were to get rid of all the undocumented workers in this country, tomorrow the economy will likely collapse. Food prices will go up. Housing prices will go up. It’ll be a massive blow.” ♦
This article has been updated to reflect a scheduling change to Chavez-DeRemer’s confirmation hearing.
