September 3, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

America's unions began 2025 in a perilous situation. Union density — the share of the workforce represented by a union — had dipped below 10 percent. Years of passive leadership from the majority of America's unions, paired with an unfavorable legal landscape, had left organized labor terribly weakened.

Then Donald Trump's second term began — and, with it, an unprecedented assault on public employees. Public-sector workers have dominated union ranks in recent decades. Some 30 percent of public employees have union contracts. Less than 6 percent of private-sector workers do. That reality makes the Trump administration's assault on federal worker unions all the more worrying.

Just last week, Trump issued an executive order stripping bargaining rights from workers at more than half a dozen federal agencies. This latest broadside follows an initial order back in March that revoked protections from over a million federal workers. And that's not even mentioning what Trump has done to hamstring the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that safeguards union rights.

With that context in mind, this year's Labor Day Weekend should have been decidedly less celebratory. Where does the labor movement go from here?

Chris Mills Rodrigo
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

From Just Studying Housing Displacement to Actually Experiencing It

This week’s frontline face: Andréa Wilson, the author of a dissertation on families removed from their homes who went on to face eviction herself.

What she's doing to help create a more equal world: After six years in the same home, Wilson found herself unceremoniously evicted. Legal avenues to challenge displacement, as she knew well, do exist, but they remain prohibitively expensive for most. The ongoing scarcity of affordable housing and rising housing costs have left evictions a threat to millions more Americans.

What can be done? Wilson suggests steps that range from legally requiring just cause for evictions to restricting rent increases and providing funding for rental assistance.

Why the fight matters: "I grew up in an income-stable home, earned a Ph.D., and own a small business," Wilson wrote recently. "If someone like me can get trapped in the cycle of housing instability, anyone can. But the solutions are out there — we just need lawmakers to hear us."

A Progressive Approach to Tariff Policy

The Trump administration's approach to trade policy has been nothing short of chaotic. Seemingly random tariff levels and constant walk-backs have destabilized markets worldwide. Trump has made “tariff” a dirty policy word.

But progressives shouldn’t abandon this trade policy tool, Sara Steffens from the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center argues in a new piece for Inequality.org. Corporate trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement — the disastrous NAFTA — have indeed been deeply harmful to workers. But strategic tariffs, says Steffens, can promote higher labor standards, protect the environment, and build supply chain resilience.

From 2019 through 2024, America’s 100 lowest-wage corporations spent a total of $644 billion on stock buybacks, a once-illegal maneuver that drives up stock price and inflates executive pay. Excluding Amazon, an outlier in capital expenditures, this group as a whole has spent considerably more on buybacks than on capital expenditures over the past six years.

Every dollar spent on buybacks represents a dollar not spent on investments vital to long-term value creation, investments that can range from strengthening innovation through better employee training to upgrading technologies and properties. More in our Executive Excess report below.

This Tennis Ace CEO Has Double-Faulted Away His Future

This week’s dour deep pocket: Piotr Szczerek, the millionaire CEO of an industry-leading Polish paving company and an ardent, nationally ranked amateur tennis player.

What has Szczerek sour: the worldwide horror at his behavior after the victory last Thursday of his fellow countryman, the tennis star Kamil Majchrzak, at the prestigious U.S. Open championship in New York. Szczerek snatched out of the hand of the victorious Majchrzak an autographed hat meant for a small boy.

Szczerek then stuffed the hat in his wife’s handbag while the boy protested. The incident, caught on a video that quickly went viral, sparked an global outpouring of online outrage. Szczerek has since deleted his social media accounts.

No figure on Szczerek’s net worth has yet become publicly available. But that fortune appears ample. Back home in Poland, Szczerek has installed a full-size tennis court on his private estate.  

The last word: “If you can afford to be at the US Open,” noted one Szczerek critic after last week’s U.S. Open incident, “there is no need to steal some kid’s stuff.”

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