Trump Is Tearing Apart Workers' Rights - Now America Is on a Watchlist Alongside Sierra Leone and Mali

It has always been part of America's story about itself that it lectures the rest of the world about freedom. For generations, the country presented itself as a champion of democracy and the rule of law, warning others, lecturing others, convinced of its own moral authority. This summer, the world is holding up a mirror instead, demanding that America live up at home to the values it has preached abroad.

Last month, the International Trade Union Confederation, an umbrella organization representing more than 200 million workers in 169 countries, placed the United States on its Watchlist. Its Global Rights Index evaluates more than 150 countries using 97 indicators derived from international labor standards and established legal principles. The result places America among countries where workers' rights are considered to be systematically violated, on a Watchlist alongside Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Philippines, and Uganda. The country that once judged others now finds itself in the dock.

The justification is serious. More than one million federal employees have reportedly lost their right to collective bargaining. The National Labor Relations Board has been rendered unable to carry out its responsibility of protecting workers' rights. Tens of thousands of unionized immigrants have allegedly been stripped of their legal status and workplace protections after the unlawful termination of federal protection programs. According to the report, immigration authorities are also being used as a tool to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly by detaining workers or revoking their visas whenever they oppose the policies of the Trump administration.

It would be a mistake to see this as nothing more than a dispute over wages and working conditions. The Trump administration's actions target the right to organize and to speak freely, and their impact reaches far beyond the factory floor. When people stand up for themselves in the workplace, they learn something they carry back into their communities. For many, a union is where they cast their first vote. For many others, it is where they first run for office. Organized labor has always been more than an organization representing workers' interests. It has been a school of self-government where ordinary people learned to raise their voices and bring others together behind a common cause. At this very moment, 564 union members and members of their households are running as candidates in the upcoming midterm elections, and that number is expected to grow as the fall campaign season approaches.

This is what is truly at stake. Freedom is not something you acquire and then lock away. It is something that must be practiced, and it withers the moment people stop exercising it. A right that is no longer used gradually loses its strength, and a government that takes away the place where people learn how to participate in public life weakens far more than their paychecks. It weakens their ability to be citizens. Once that ability begins to disappear, a society also becomes increasingly defenseless against everything else - corruption, the abuse of technology, and corporate greed. Decline rarely begins with a dramatic revolution. It begins quietly, with the loss of the small rights through which people learn to exercise the larger ones, long before they even realize that the opportunity to practice them has been taken away.

What is happening in America will not remain confined to America. The erosion of workers' rights sets a dangerous precedent because governments and employers around the world are watching closely. So is global capital, carefully noting where resistance can be weakened at the lowest cost. Some will undoubtedly feel encouraged to follow the example. For decades, America set the standard by which others were judged. Now it is setting an example in the opposite direction. The nation that once led by example is now teaching the wrong lesson as it falls.

Here is the full report and the Watchlist

And yet the story is far from over. Across the country, workers continue organizing, winning recognition for their unions, and negotiating better wages and working conditions. Their determination serves as a reminder of a truth that is easy to forget in an age dominated by institutions: no constitution sustains itself. A democracy does not survive because of its offices or agencies. It survives because people are willing to defend it every single day.

That is exactly where our work begins. Alongside our investigations and documentation, we stand with those who have been jailed during protests or arbitrarily detained by ICE. Time and again, we encounter the same dangerous illusion - that America is far away and what happens there has nothing to do with us. It is the most comfortable form of self-deception because decline rarely begins with a dramatic revolution. It begins quietly, with the loss of the small rights through which people learn to exercise the larger ones, long before they realize that opportunity has been taken away. Europe is already showing the same warning signs. What is missing is resistance - a determined movement that uses the rule of law and meticulous documentation to win one victory after another against those in power. Yes, that comes with consequences. But let's be honest, there has never been another way. Anyone who raises their voice for justice and freedom accomplishes very little if it ends with a social media post or a halfhearted investigation that never names the people responsible, never explains the background, and never identifies the perpetrators. We see examples of that path across Europe every single day. Freedom has never been a gift handed down by those in power. It is something that must be taken from them - day after day, through determination, resistance, and relentless documentation by people who refuse to accept the comfortable illusion.

That is the quiet irony of the Watchlist. It does not expose America because everything is already lost. It exposes America because there is still something left to lose that disappeared long ago in many other places. When American workers fight for their rights, they strengthen democracy not only in their own country but everywhere that someone is still waiting for their example.