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I woke up Friday, August 29, 2025, to the news that President Donald Trump had issued another of his infamous executive orders (Further Exclusions from the Federal Labor-Management Relations Program) the day before. The order sought to strip union rights from the employees of a number of government agencies. (The New York Times reported on this development here.)

Technically, Trump’s order did not come on Labor Day weekend—Labor Day would be Monday, September 1, four days later—but it was close enough to be ironic or, more properly, gratuitously loathsome. Apparently, this is how Donald Trump chose to celebrate the federal holiday intended, according to Wikipedia, “to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers to the development and achievements in the United States.”

My last Labor Day poem was “Labor Day Lament, 2011,” written at a time when I thought ordinary workers were not getting a fair deal. On subsequent Labor Days, I considered writing another poem about the plight of ordinary Americans but never seemed to get around to it. President Trump’s recent action, however, was an inspiration, if only for a modest effort. Would that matters for Americans were only as bad as they were in 2011!

I thought of writing this haiku on 8/30/2025 and actually wrote it the next day.

— LED, 8/31/2025