1 day Ago By David Bonior
As a little boy in the 1950s, I would meet my Ukrainian grandfather at the corner of our block when he returned from his shift at the historic Dodge Main auto plant in Hamtramck. I would reach up to grab his bare callused hand, the other gripping his now empty black steel lunch bucket. We would then walk, mostly in silence, the long block to our house.
To keep pace with his longer stride I would break into skipping which always seemed to delight him. Those were heady days for workers thanks to the Democrats and the National Labor Relations Act, the Magna Carta of workers. Over 60% of workers in our community were unionized.
It assured them of a good and fair negotiated wage plus benefits. The wage differential between workers and their employers was a small fraction of what it is today. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports that the ratio between CEO compensation and how much their workers make has skyrocketed over the last several decades.
The ratio escalated especially rapidly over the past 20 years. For instance, in 1978, CEOs made around 30 times more than workers. By 2000, that grew to around 372.
According to EPI, realized CEO compensation has grown by 1,460% since 1978. Back in the 1950s at mass on Sunday the priests would sing the praises of the labor Popes like Leo XIII who defended workers and condemned exploitations of abusive employers. Decades later Pope John Paul II preached worker solidarity on his way to toppling communism and worker repression.
It was not just a slogan or a movement. It was what we took pride in, what we felt deeply inside. After all, Jesus’s father was a carpenter as was He.
The dignity of all work was honored as a value worth passing on to sons and daughters and grandchildren. It is now 75 years later from that memory of meeting my grandfather. Today, President Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is Russell Vought, a Christian Nationalist, who was central to the Project 2025 blueprint which Trump is using against workers.
Steve Greenhouse the longtime former labor writer at The New York Times recently wrote in the Guardian (a British Newspaper) a scathing article about Trump’s treatment of workers. Greenhouse started with the reprehensible words of Russell Vought who said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as villains.
We want their funding to shut down. WE WANT TO PUT THEM IN TRAUMA.” Vought is speaking of the workers who process our Social Security, Medicare, Veterans benefits and more.
Trump has surrounded himself with uncaring and powerful people like Elon Musk. This oligarch, the richest man in the world, and his cronies are at the forefront of attacks on workers. Recently, Musk and his young and inexperienced executioners have terminated bargaining rights for over one million federal workers.
Fifty thousand of them were sacked ignoring their contractual protections in another lawless effort to “make America great again.” Regarding Musk, Greenhouse asked, “Would anyone who cared a whit about workers and unions tap Musk for such a powerful position?” Trump has called on federal workers to snitch on each other; to report on co-workers who promote diversity and inclusion. And the president has underscored all of this by firing the head of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox.
The NLRB’s pro-union general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo has been replaced with management lawyers from firms who represent anti-union companies such as SpaceX and Tesla. Trump has done nothing to raise the federal minimum wage since he first took office in 2017. It has been frozen at $7.
25 for the past 15 years, denying our lowest wage earners anything close to a livable wage. And if you consider yourself and your family part of the middle class, well strap yourself in for the coming recession. Trump is leading our country and the rest of the world economy into disaster.
You are losing money in your pensions, savings, and IRAs. Any hopes for a new car may be unaffordable because of a tariff policy that may increase car prices between $4,000 and $12,000. Stock markets are taking your 529s for your children’s and grandchildren’s educational opportunities down with them.
Make no mistake about where Trump has led us. He has taken us for “a ride.” We are now living in the Gilded Age run by oligarchs like Trump, Musk, and their associates.
Like their SpaceX rockets, our futures are blowing up all around us. You worked hard to save some money. You sacrificed.
You hoped to enjoy the rewards later. But now you watch in horror as it drains away. Our workers and their families, many who bought into these charlatans, are paying a heavy price.
All we have struggled and built over the past century is collapsing. Leaders and voters alike have failed to meet the great challenges presented to them. Now we live the tragic consequences.
I have lived long enough to realize that these depressive down cycles can turn up. My Ukrainian grandfather and grandmother lived in such a time when they came to the United States in 1919. My pregnant grandmother and her husband were locked up in prison because their passport identified them as immigrants from the Hapsburg Empire (now Western Ukraine).
At that time fresh from the massive destruction of World War I, they were thought to be the enemy aligned with the Central Powers led by Germany even though the previous seven years they resided in Canada. In a Washington Post opinion piece recently, the eminent historian Adam Hochschild reminds us that during and after World War I there was massive repression, Trumpian style, in the United States. “The Government shut down 75 newspaper and magazines, threw into prison roughly 1,000 Americans for a year or more solely for the things they wrote or said.
The Justice Department chartered a nationwide vigilante group, the American Protective League. Its 250,000 members seized, roughed up and detained suspected draft evaders, violently broke up peace demonstrations, and joined government agents in raiding left-wing and labor organizations. “Just over a century ago, a major war, fear of foreign subversion and an administration with little respect for civil liberties unleashed several years of the worst repression in the U.
S. since the immediate aftermath of slavery.” On April 5, 2025, my wife Judy and I joined other members of our family, children, and grandchildren as well as millions of others across the United States to protest the actions of Trump, Musk and their associates.
The protests were strong and peaceful emanating rays of light and perhaps signaling the resistance that we have been waiting for. Many handheld signs read, “This is what democracy looks like!” David Bonior represented Macomb County and Michigan in the House of Representatives from 1977 to 2003. He served as Democratic whip from 1991 to 2002.
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