The main culprit of the sharp infringement of workers' rights in the world has been found

Trump is wreaking havoc on workers' rights amid global 'free fall', new report says. The International Trade Union Confederation has released a report showing conditions for workers' rights around the world have worsened.

According to the 2025 Global Labour Rights Index, published by the International Trade Union Confederation, the world's largest trade union federation, workers' rights are in "free fall" on every continent.

The index notes that workers’ rights and democracy around the world are often under attack from “far-right politicians and their unelected billionaire supporters. Whether it’s Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the US or Javier Miley and Eduardo Eurnekian in Argentina, we see the same pattern of injustice and authoritarianism at work around the world.”

In the US, the index points out that “the Donald Trump administration has dealt a major blow to workers’ collective labour rights and brought in anti-union billionaires to shape policy.”

The Guardian reports that these actions, according to the index, include stripping union protections from 47,000 Transportation Security Administration workers, attempting to roll back civil service protections for a large number of federal employees, and firing a member of the National Labor Relations Board, leaving it without a quorum.

Luc Triangle, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, said the report covers events up to March 2025, but the trends in the US have continued to worsen since then.

The Trump administration also drastically cut the staff of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, fired a board member of the Federal Labor Relations Board, and issued an executive order stripping collective bargaining rights from most federal employees.

“In more and more countries, we are electing leaders who, once they are democratically elected, take actions that are contrary to democratic values,” Triangle notes. “The first target of these leaders in many countries is that they attack human rights in trade and labor rights, because we are the greatest defenders of democratic values ​​and in that sense also their greatest opponents as the largest social movement in the world.”

Three out of five regions in the world have seen their workers' rights situation deteriorate, with the Americas and Europe recording their worst scores on the index since it was launched in 2014, The Guardian reports. Only seven of the 151 countries surveyed by the index had a high rating for workers' rights, down from 18 in 2015.

Workers' access to justice was restricted in 72% of countries surveyed, the worst ever recorded, while the right to strike was violated in 87% of countries and the right to collective bargaining was violated in 80%.

According to the report, the worst countries for workers are Bangladesh, Belarus, Ecuador, Egypt, Eswatini, Myanmar, Nigeria, the Philippines, Tunisia and Turkey.

Only three countries, Australia, Mexico and Oman, saw their rankings improve compared to 2024.

Triangle warns that the billionaires who back these politicians have emerged from the shadows and have only increased their wealth and control over important sectors of society as a result of a billionaire “coup” in democratic institutions around the world that is contributing to the deterioration of conditions for workers’ rights.

“Over the last four or five years, because of Covid and rising inflation, people have lost purchasing power and that has become a breeding ground for extremist parties to force voters to vote for extremist parties that don’t actually offer any solution for working people,” Triangle said.

The Federation of Trade Unions campaigns for democracy against the framework used by Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the US, and other billionaires and far-right political leaders around the world: “The world’s five richest people have more than doubled their wealth in the last five years, while 60% of the world’s population has become poorer. We invest almost $3 trillion in weapons, and there is unfair taxation in this world. So if we are going to find the money to give working people what they really need – good wages, more jobs, rights, social protection – it is a question of political choice.”