Thousands of workers and union organizers from across California will gather for picnics and marches this weekend to honor the contributions of the nation’s working people.
But the Labor Day celebrations will be tempered by a sobering reality: Unions face mounting pressure to protect their members from the Trump administration’s immigration raids, cuts in Medicaid services and a weakened National Labor Relations Board.
“We know how important we are to preserving and protecting democracy,” said Lorena Gonzalez, head of the California Labor Federation. “We have a special role in that. We are not going to get silenced, and we’re not going to be paralyzed.”
From farm fields to car washes, labor groups have scrambled to support families of the hundreds detained and deported in numerous chaotic and violent raids that have resulted in the deaths of two people —a day laborer and a farmworker — killed while fleeing federal agents.
The raids reverberated across the state’s local labor community in June when David Huerta of SEIU California was injured and detained by law enforcement while documenting the first major immigration enforcement raids in Los Angeles.
“Farmworkers are afraid….They don’t know what’s going to happen from one day to the next with these raids, but they understand the only way we’re going to have power is if we come together,” said Teresa Romero, president of United Farm Workers.
Romero and other union leaders said their focus remains on organizing more workplaces, while also working to educate people on their rights and staging legal and nonviolent protests against government policies.
“We are all under attack by the federal government right now,” said Jeremy Goldberg, executive director of the Central Coast Labor Council. “The need is tremendous.”
In early August, the Trump administration moved forward with a plan to end collective bargaining with federal unions across a swath of government agencies. The government said the changes were necessary to protect national security, but unions viewed it as retaliation for their participation in lawsuits opposing the president’s policies.
The Trump administration has also proposed sweeping cuts to the staff of the National Labor Relations Board — which is tasked with safeguarding the right of private employees to unionize or organize in other ways to improve their working conditions — and canceled leases for regional offices in many states.
Union officials contend the changes could hobble the board and prevent it from investigating unfair labor practice charges filed by workers and carrying out its other responsibilities, such as overseeing elections.
“Important rules and regulations that were put in place during the Biden administration that were helpful to workers — those are systematically being rolled back,” said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Low-Wage Work Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Unions are bracing for further challenges that could arise when Trump finally makes appointments to the federal labor board, which is currently nonoperational, because it doesn’t have enough board members to rule on cases.
But even as many labor leaders have openly opposed the Trump administration, others have taken a more muted approach. Major national unions, such as United Auto Workers and the Teamsters, have supported aspects of the Trump agenda on tariffs abroad and a push for manufacturing jobs at home.
The changes portend tough times ahead for California unions.
John Logan, a professor of U.S. labor history at San Francisco State, said that Trump’s hostility toward California and withholding of federal funds from universities, healthcare facilities and other institutions will squeeze the state budget, with major effects on public sector workers in the form of layoffs and other cost-cutting. And the administration’s relentless immigrant raids are consuming the time, attention and resources of unions, he said.
Although California has a larger share of its workforce represented by unions compared with many other states, that density is overly reliant on public sector workers, and membership of those unions is likely to shrink in the coming years, Logan said.
Unions are “ill-equipped to deal with this moment of crisis,” Logan said. “The labor movement is fighting for its survival over the next four years.”
Challenges are especially acute in the healthcare industry.
Unions representing in-home care providers, nurses and other healthcare workers said their members are already feeling the squeeze wrought by the lead up to and approval of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which includes tax spending cuts that will affect millions of Medicaid recipients while growing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency by thousands of workers.
SEIU Local 2015 President Arnulfo De La Cruz said many in-home care providers who have cared for people for decades are now faced with the prospect that the people they care for are going to lose their healthcare, and that they themselves may lose their healthcare and their jobs.
“To have our healthcare under attack, to have our families under attack — that’s a huge reversal in how we are recognizing essential workers,” De La Cruz said.
Major medical facilities, including Sharp HealthCare, UC San Diego Health and UCSF Health, have in recent months announced plans to cut public health services and conduct hundreds of layoffs, citing significant financial headwinds and the uncertainty of federal funding.
“It’s a nasty bill. There’s nothing beautiful about that bill,” said Cynthia Williams, an Orange County resident and member of AFSCME Local 3930. Williams is a full-time caregiver for both her daughter, who is blind and has cerebral palsy, and her sister, who is a veteran living with severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
Williams said the In-Home Supportive Services program — funded primarily by Medicaid — has preemptively cut funding for transportation to her sister’s weekly appointments. The hours Williams is paid for to care for her daughter have been reduced.
“The last few months have been very stressful and very unpredictable,” Williams said.
