Anti-Union Crusader Tilts Labor Department Toward Big Business

Co-published with the Center for Media and Democracy 

A top Trump labor official responsible for protecting workers’ rights and transparency in labor-management relations failed to disclose more than $750,000 in compensation for her and her husband from anti-union groups when President Trump appointed her to the position in 2025. 

In her role as director of the Department of Labor’s little-known Office of Labor-Management Standards since February 2025, Elisabeth Messenger has overseen a crackdown on unions while ignoring and failing to report union-busting by employers. 

The revelations illustrate the tight links between the Trump administration’s top labor enforcers and a broad network of anti-union advocacy and litigation groups funded by corporate and right-wing foundations. As the labor movement has aggressively pushed back on Trump’s attacks on federal workers, the immigrant labor force, and public education, the administration has in turn sought to burden unions with a deluge of paperwork and allowed corporations to engage in union avoidance activities while avoiding clear disclosure requirements. 

Congress first established the Office of Labor-Management Standards in 1959 to protect workers’ rights, promote transparency between labor and management, and support union democracy, financial integrity, and self-governance.

While past reporting has covered Messenger’s recent position as CEO of Americans for Fair Treatment, a group dedicated to weakening public employee unions, a Center for Media and Democracy review of the group’s tax filings shows that she received $419,556 in payments from the organization after her departure in July 2024, with only $161,541 of that categorized as “severance payments.” 

Messenger’s husband, William Messenger, is a vice president and the legal director of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which is solely focused on litigating against the labor movement. The group paid him more than $300,000 in compensation in 2025, making him its highest-paid employee and bringing the couple’s income from anti-union groups to more than $750,000 in the months leading up to Elisabeth Messenger’s appointment.

Messenger failed to report her salary at Americans for Fair Treatment in the 12 months prior to her appointment and entered “None” in the section of the “New Entrant” ethics report requiring disclosure of employer severance payments and similar arrangements. She did report her husband’s employment at National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, but left the box for his income amount blank. Her official Department of Labor profile also makes no mention of her past employment by Americans for Fair Treatment, citing only “leadership positions at several nonprofit organizations focused on free market policies and protecting First Amendment rights.”

“Director Messenger takes her ethical obligations seriously and follows all guidance provided by career ethics officials regarding the standards of ethical conduct and other ethics statutes and regulations,” a spokesperson for the Department of Labor told Center for Media and Democracy. The person declined to respond to further questions, and Americans for Fair Treatment also did not respond to requests for comment.

William Messenger first attracted national attention for successfully arguing the Janus v. AFSCME case before the Supreme Court in 2018 on behalf of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. Janus, which the Roberts Court decided in a 5–4 decision, overturned the Abood precedent that had allowed public sector employers to bargain over “agency fees” paid by non-members for the cost of union representation. Abood addressed the “free rider” problem of individual workers benefiting from union representation without paying for it. 

In an article titled “The Lawyers Who Beat the Unions,” The Wall Street Journal noted that William Messenger had litigated a 2014 case, Harris v. Quinn, that helped lay the groundwork for the Janus decision. 

Elisabeth Messenger’s ethics filing with the federal government also revealed that she had briefly consulted with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has attacked teachers unions for their positions on foreign policy, in February 2025. 

The Office of Labor-Management Standards, which is responsible for both enforcing union compliance with laws governing financial transparency and ensuring that employers and their “union buster” consulting firms file required disclosures about their anti-union activity, has seen a massive drop-off in the latter disclosures in the year and a half since Messenger took charge of the agency. 

A recent report by LaborLab, a pro-union group, found that employers complied with filing requirements in just 58 percent of cases in 2025, which represents a steep dropoff from previous years. An analysis by LaborLab and the Economic Policy Institute last May found that employers spend over $1.5 billion annually on union avoidance, the vast majority of which is not disclosed. 

While reporting by corporations has gone by the wayside, Messenger has expanded reporting requirements for unions, which are compelled to disclose far more about their activities publicly than any other tax-exempt organizations. 

“The [new] policy, known as ‘the LM–2 long form,’ is designed to drown unions in paperwork and drain them of resources needed to organize, collectively bargain, and advocate for their members—especially for smaller unions [that] are particularly challenged to take on the additional administrative burden,” the AFL-CIO  stated in its June press release announcing that it would sue over the Labor Department’s new reporting requirements. “Meanwhile, wealthy corporations continue to go under-scrutinized, allowed to get away with minimal reporting requirements compared to the unions [that represent] the workers [who] create their profit.” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler added that the administration is “using every tool in the toolbox to come after workers.”

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is affiliated with the National Right to Work Committee, which lobbies for state and federal anti-union legislation. Among its founders were the PR firm Selvage & Lee, which is now part of the French firm Publicis (one of the “Big Three” global advertising firms), as well as representatives from General Electric and the Santa Fe Railway (now a part of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, which is itself part of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway empire). 

Americans for Fair Treatment works alongside the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation in the post-Janus landscape. Founded in 2014 as an affiliate of the Pennsylvania-based Commonwealth Foundation, the group encourages teachers to leave their unions, following the same script as the Freedom Foundation. 

The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Janus case was a big win for the far right and the Koch network in the US—led by the Bradley Foundation and billionaire heirs Charles and David Koch—whose longstanding goal has been to destroy the ability of public sector unions to advance their members’ interests and to deal a “mortal blow” to progressive politics.

Messenger’s actions at the Office of Labor-Management Standards appear to be largely following the playbook set out in the labor section of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Written by current Solicitor of Labor Jonathan Berry (the Labor Department’s top attorney), it calls for expanding disclosure requirements for unions, among other anti-worker measures. 

Bob Funk, executive director of LaborLab, told the Center for Media and Democracy that since “an extensive, well-funded industry of union-busters now wields enormous influence within the [Office of Labor-Management Standards], it’s no wonder corporate compliance with labor relations laws is staggeringly low—and still falling.”