January 20, 2025 is the 39th anniversary of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday. It is also the second inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States. There could not be a more ironic crossing of histories from one who spews ridicule, hatred, and division to an honorable and consequential life that was given in sacrifice to end oppression, injustice, and malice.
For the labor movement, this MLK Day is especially important as Donald Trump takes office. We must be prepared to organize the working class to higher levels in this period of uncertainty; to resist all policies, laws, and programs that hurt working people on the job and in the community; and to defend the democratic rights of working people from the right to unionize to the right of affordable living standards and living wages.
In the wake of the East and Gulf Coast longshore workers’ contract negotiations with the port employers association, the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), Trump was given credit by the conservative International Longshoremen Association (ILA) President Harold Daggett for the parties reaching a tentative agreement that avoids another major strike. ILA members must now ratify the tentative agreement. It’s the power of the workers, not Trump, that won this agreement. We must be clear in this period, as Trump and the far-right section of the capitalist class whose interests he represents, attempts to make these opportunistic appeals to the working class.
The Trump administration will take office with a plan to privatize goods and services including Medicare, education, public lands, and more, alongside building more private prisons, and so on. The administration’s plan to establish an unofficial government agency to cut government departments will mean the loss of jobs for millions of workers across the federal government.
In fact, Trump’s Project 2025 projects plan to eliminate unions in the public sector, making unions even more difficult to organize by making anti-union “right to work” laws national in scope, and eliminating basic protections for workers in general in both the public and private sector.
The Southern Workers Assembly (SWA) endorses the call of national trade unions to prepare for and organize a national strike beginning on May Day 2028. We believe such a call must not only unify the national labor movement politically and organizationally but must also deliberately plan to unite with the primarily unorganized workers in the South to effectively strengthen labor nationally. To that end, SWA is calling for a southern regional Worker Action Summit in late May in South Carolina to advance the organization of non-union workers across the South in both the public and private sectors and to link with the plan for a national strike by supporting the development of workplace organizations and workers assemblies.
New investments in industrial sectors, largely in the South, such as in electric vehicles and related branches, will likely continue under Trump, presenting a tough but important opportunity to build socially conscious new trade unions in the South,perhaps leading to a Southern Labor Congress of progressive southern unions.
Finally, Southern organizing and other goals to build and rebuild a national trade union movement must not make the “Operation Dixie” mistake of treating the Black working class as an afterthought to organized labor but must instead see the Black working class, as an organized force — as a potentially central driving force – and ally of the national labor movement.