Trump wants to destroy unions. A general strike is the only way to fight back
The worst thing that the federal government has done to labor unions in my lifetime happened this week. Donald Trump signed an executive order saying that the government will no longer recognize and bargain with a huge portion of the unions that represent federal workers. Among the agencies where he says he is tossing out the union contracts are the VA, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the Department of Energy, the EPA, the Treasury Department, the Department of Justice, and others.
To justify this move, Trump said that all of these agencies are involved in “national security.” This is a fiction. His statement also said that “Certain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda,” which is closer to the true motivation. He doesn’t like these unions, so he is just trying to erase them with the stroke of a pen. None of his Republican predecessors in the White House for the past half century ever considered doing something this outrageous. In comparison to this, Ronald Reagan’s firing of the striking air traffic controllers at PATCO was a calm and reasonable decision.
There are more than a million union members working in the federal government. I have not seen an official count, but this executive order targets most of them. It is also meant to establish the precedent that the president is capable of destroying entire unions using flimsy legalistic pretexts. Oh, the Environmental Protection Agency is “determined to have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work,” so you can throw out its fairly negotiated existing union contract, and that is okay? Sure. Treating any of this as a legitimate political position is a mistake. This is just running into the middle of organized labor swinging around a chainsaw.
You may recall that earlier this month, the Trump administration declared that it was unilaterally tossing out the union contract covering 50,000 TSA workers. When that happened, I said that it was the worst thing to happen to unions in America in my lifetime. And it was. This latest action is many times worse. It is multiplying the unilateral attack on workers at a single agency across the entire federal government. When a presidential administration does the two worst things in the past half century within three weeks of one another, that is enough data to understand what is happening. With two points, you can draw a line.
Now is not the time for organized labor to sit in conference rooms with their lawyers going “Ermm, well, this is certainly a rather radical interpretation of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978!” My brothers and sisters, this is war. Republicans don’t want unions to exist. And they are coming for us. Right now. Rouse yourselves.
Here is what is happening: First they are coming for the federal unions—the lowest-hanging fruit, the most bureaucratic unions, the ones barred from striking. Then they will proceed to come for all public-sector unions. Then they will come for private-sector unions. Understand that the transparently bullshit nature of the justification for this move—“Uh, everything is national security, therefore Trump is king over you”—is a preview of what will be more transparently bullshit justifications for them to conduct further outrageous assaults on the very existence of organized labor. They don’t give a fuck. They are proving, over and over again, that they don’t give a fuck. This is not about law. This is about power.
The point of the labor movement is to give working people power. That is what unions do. The unions of America purport to be powerful. If we imagine that all of our power is dependent on the kindness of the president—and that it therefore can be wiped away in one day because a particular president is willing to stretch the wording of the law as far as his imagination will let him—then we were just bluffing the whole time. In that case, we never really had power at all. We were lying to all the working people who believed that solidarity would produce a sort of power that was not a polite request, but an inherent fact. Do unions have power or not? If they do, the time to exercise that power is now.
We, the labor movement, cannot allow individual unions or individual sectors to be picked off by our fascist government as the rest of us stand by, thankful that we weren’t targeted this time. That is the road to death. It is also an abdication of solidarity, which is, in fact, the source of our power. Naturally, if we do not act in accordance with the source of our power, we are going to be weak. And, throughout these hectic first months of the Trump administration, the unions of America have looked extremely weak. It is time to fucking wake up and act as one, before it’s too late.
It is unreasonable to run around demanding a general strike every time a single union gets in a hard fight. It is not unreasonable to demand a general strike when the very existence of unions is under direct attack by a government that cares nothing about us, and does not respect our contracts, and is attempting to throw in the trash the union contracts covering hundreds of thousands of our fellow union members, as a step toward doing the same thing to millions more of our fellow union members.
This is the bombing of Pearl Harbor, against the labor movement. Will we say, “We are filing a lawsuit against this illegal bombing, and we will keep you all updated as it progresses?” Will we say, “Pearl Harbor is way out in Hawaii. I’m glad those bombs didn’t fall where I live.” These are the terms that the union world needs to be thinking in, right now. This is not an exaggeration. If we do not go to war, the husk of American unions that emerges at the end of the Trump administration will be, probably, about half as big as it was when the Trump administration started, and immeasurably weaker. That is not an acceptable outcome if you believe that increasing organized labor’s strength is the key to saving this country, which it is.
It is trite to use boxing stories as metaphors, and I really try to avoid doing it, but I am going to do it today, as a special occasion. When you start boxing, sooner or later you will experience a moment when you realize in a deep and palpable way that nobody is coming to save you in there. One day, you will be getting your ass kicked, and you will be getting hurt, and you will look around and see that there is nobody else in that ring but you and the person who is kicking your ass. There is no other authority to appeal to. There is no button to push to stop the massacre. Even though the fight may not be fair, even though the person beating you up may be bigger and stronger than you, the raw fact is that you will either fight back and defend yourself, or you are going down. There are no other choices. This realization has the clarifying effect of wiping away your illusions about the world and leaving you with one clear path forward.
That is the position that we, the labor movement, are in. It is all on us. Of course the successive illegal actions of this administration should all be challenged in court, but it is foolish to expect the courts to save us from what is happening. The courts will be, at best, a momentary tap of the brakes. This administration does not care about the law. Nor do they care about the fundamental right of working people to choose to come together as a union for the purpose of collective bargaining. They want to destroy all of that. And they will, unless we, ourselves, stop them.
If you are a union member, contact the president of your union today and make it clear to them that inaction right now is unacceptable, and tell them also to contact the AFL-CIO with the same message. Tell them you are ready for a general strike for your brothers and sisters who work in the federal government, and for all of us. Tell them that this administration is an enemy to the existence of unions and that any union that believes that they can be an ally to this administration is undermining the solidarity of all working people.
There is a surreal nature to living through drastic things—watching things unfold that we have only imagined as abstract possibilities. That surreality can be paralyzing. It can turn us into spectators of our own demise. Let’s not do that. I don’t want to write new “the worst thing that has happened in my lifetime” pieces every few weeks. The labor movement is supposed to have the power to shut things down. Time to act like it. Or, to prepare to die. Only two things are left on the menu. No substitutions allowed.
This piece first appeared on labor journalist Hamilton Nolan’s Substack, How Things Work.