The Labor Day 2025 Action Plan to Combat Trump’s War on Working Women

September 1. 2025

Statement by Noreen Farrell, Executive Director of Equal Rights Advocates, on the coordinated assault forcing women out of the workforce

Sept. 1, 2025 — This Labor Day, we celebrate the dignity and power of working people. Throughout history, workers have been the driving force of innovation and progress, organizing to secure better working conditions, fair wages, and the economic strength that defines America. Their collective action has built the middle class and continues to shape our nation’s values.

The labor movement is achieving remarkable victories across the country, often led by lower paid and immigrant women workers. Dozens of states have raised minimum wages, eliminated the tipped minimum wage, and expanded access to paid family leave. Workers are winning pay scale transparency requirements, stronger workplace harassment protections, and enhanced rights to collective action. Courts nationwide are defending longstanding worker rights, while local and federal policymakers advance legislation that improves working families’ lives.

Yet progress for workers faces systematic threats. The Trump Administration’s assault on workplace protections—dismantling DEI programs, eliminating childcare support, and gutting enforcement agencies like the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs—represents a coordinated effort to roll back decades of hard-won worker and women’s rights. When 212,000 women have left the workforce since January alone and the administration moves to hide the workplace participation data exposing this crisis, we see the authoritarian playbook in action: create the crisis through policy attacks, then eliminate evidence of the damage. Eliminating the jobs report while women flee the workforce isn’t incompetence, it’s the intended outcome of Trump’s war on civil rights.

The assault is more extreme on immigrant workers, including women who left their country to contribute so much to this one. Trump’s mass deportation raids are terrorizing immigrant communities where women serve as the economic backbone of their families and inspirational labor leaders. Documented and undocumented immigrant women, who work in essential industries, now face impossible choices between supporting their families and avoiding detection. Many are withdrawing from formal employment entirely, creating ripple effects that harm not just immigrant families but entire communities that depend on their labor and economic contributions.

But we have to remember that solutions remain within reach. As the labor movement ended child labor, 18-hour days, and unsafe working conditions, it must push back on today’s wave of oppression and unlawful exploitation of workers.

We must continue demanding policy reforms that protect workers’ healthcare options and collective bargaining rights, while supporting organizations defending constitutional protections for all workers. Our response requires using every available tool—from supporting companies aligned with workplace justice values to holding elected officials accountable at the ballot box.

This Labor Day, as we honor the workers who built America, we do so with clarity about both our progress and the threats we face. The labor movement’s strength lies not just in celebrating past victories, but in the determination to defend and expand worker power for all.

To request an interview contact Erin Musgrave at [email protected] or (530) 864-7014. 

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About Equal Rights Advocates
Equal Rights Advocates fights for gender justice in workplaces and schools across the country. Since 1974, they have been fighting on the front lines of social justice to protect and advance rights and opportunities for women, girls, and people of all gender identities through groundbreaking legal cases and bold legislation that sets the stage for the rest of the nation.