President Donald Trump, despite promising to create manufacturing jobs, is presiding over an economy marked by weak job gains in manufacturing sectors and widespread layoffs. Now experts are writing Labor Day editorials to explain how ordinary Americans can strike back and reclaim economic agency — and do so by exploiting weaknesses in Trump’s own approach.
“On Labor Day 2026, the outlook for workers can seem grim,” wrote Terri Gerstein (the director of the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service) and Gaby Goldstein (the founder and president of State Futures) in the New Republic on Monday. “The Trump administration is rolling back workplace protections, and corporations act as though they have a free pass to do whatever they want.”
Yet despite these problems, Gerstein and Goldstein argued there is a reason for “optimism.”
“The federal government isn’t the only game in town,” The New Republic wrote. “Union approval sits near a half-century high—roughly seven in ten Americans—worker organizing is climbing, and state and local governments are moving on workers’ rights with real dynamism.”
They pointed out that on the state level, labor organizers are effectively passing and implementing laws guaranteeing worker protection, good workplace conditions and criminal prosecution against wage theft. On some occasions they are even creating workplace rights bureaus. From there, they advocate for Americans across these states to work together.
“For all this motion, a new ingredient should also be stirred in: cross-state coordination,” Gerstein and Goldstein said. “Conservatives have long understood that states acting together, through the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, and its allies, can move markets and set national agendas. Progressives should be just as ambitious: sharing rosters of labor violators so a scofflaw barred in one state can’t win contracts in the next, coordinating multi-state cases, and even synchronizing the “drop dates” on which state labor bills are introduced.”
While blue states are more friendly to these initiatives than red states, even Trumpy and purple areas of America are seeing progress on workers’ rights issues.
“State legislators have made some minor inroads even in more challenging terrain: Utah and New Hampshire both curbed non-competes for certain health care workers this year,” Gerstein and Goldstein added. “And there are still more glimmers of hope: Many city and state leaders in worker-hostile states keep fighting mightily for working people. Consider recent action in deep-red Texas: Just last month, Houston’s mayor signed an executive order raising the minimum wage at the city’s airports to $20 per hour, from its prior rate of $15. And Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located, last year passed a worksite safety policy for its construction contractors, with inspections and real consequences for violations.”
Writing for The Hill, Gerstein elaborated on how Trump’s administration has created conditions that necessitate this increased union activism.
“Sadly, the Trump administration is taking a bat to workers’ rights, reducing wage theft enforcement, shrinking the Department of Labor and weakening the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces workers’ right to unionize,” Gerstein wrote for The Hill. “With Washington hostile and the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority averse to working people, that leaves cities and states.”
“Here’s a new one: a deceptively simple, under-the-radar idea that requires no legislation and costs almost nothing,” Gerstein continued. “State and local governments can help people unionize by simply helping to organize workers. Specifically, they can host meetups between workers and local unions, and they can teach the public about unions.”
Earlier on Monday, The Conversation also ran a piece elaborating on the “bleak” conditions facing American workers as Trump continues to gut labor protections.
“For America’s unionized workforce, the overall state of the economy is bleak,” The Conversation wrote. “Threats from AI and robotics abound. Pledges by U.S. and international corporations to invest in new plants remain largely pledges. The roughly 400,000 federal job cuts during President Donald Trump’s second term have disrupted lives. Many of these jobs were previously represented by labor unions.”