American Workers Have Been Bashed And Bullied Long Enough
Unions were a big deal when I was a kid. I got my first union card— working in a print shop on Long Island— when I was barely a teenager. Everyone in my family was proud of me— not just my socialist grandfather but even my less progressive father. Later, the rise of neoliberal economic policies under Reagan, Clinton and beyond weakened unions through deregulation, outsourcing and so-called right-to-work laws. However, progressives never stopped emphasizing union rights in response to rising inequality, with current political leaders like Bernie, Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Mark Pocan making them a centerpiece of left-wing politics the way they were when the U.S. was industrializing in the late 1800s with workers facing brutal conditions— long hours, dangerous workplaces, poverty wages, competition from child labor.
Last week, Hamilton Nolan, in a substack titled They Are Going to Take Everything If We Don't Stop Them, wrote that the “worst thing that the federal government has done to labor unions in my lifetime” happened when 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.”
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 of 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 towards 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.
…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.
Not hard to see what’s happening here— Trump (Project 2025) is accelerating the long-running right-wing assault on unions with a direct and unprecedented power grab, reflecting the broader pattern of how reactionary forces have sought to dismantle labor rights since at least the 1940s, when conservatives first started rolling back the gains of the New Deal. It’s an escalation of the same strategy that’s been in play since Taft-Hartley in 1947, but Trump is taking it to new extremes.
Nolan is making a militant call to action, arguing that labor leaders can’t just rely on legal challenges, bureaucratic negotiations or Chuck Schumer— they have to recognize that this is an existential fight that demands direct, large-scale resistance, including a general strike. Unions exist to build worker power, not just to negotiate contracts. If they allow themselves to be steamrolled without a fight, then they’ve already lost. The labor movement is facing a wake-up call, a warning that if they treat this attack as just another policy dispute rather than an outright war on their existence, they will be sleepwalking into their own destruction. This isn’t just about labor law or contract terms, but about whether working people have any real power at all.
It’s no general strike but three federal unions are starting the process of pushing back— more than we can say about universities, law firms or media companies.. The American Federation of Government Employees, National Treasury Employees Union and National Federation of Federal Employees all say they plan to immediately sue the Trump administration over last week’s executive order. Yesterday, Ryan Knappenberger reported that “Doreen Greenwald, the union’s national president, called the order a ‘brazen, illegal attack’ that strips frontline federal employees of their right to organize. ‘The law plainly gives federal employees the right to bargain collectively and the shocking executive order abolishing that right for most of them, under the guise of national security, is an attempt to silence the voices of our nation’s public servants,’ Greenwald said in a statement. Congress created the collective bargaining agreements via the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the union said, and granted the president narrow authority to exclude certain agencies, specifically those engaged in intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative or national security work. ‘The president’s sweeping executive order is inconsistent with this narrow authority,’ the union wrote. ‘The administration’s own issuances show that the president’s exclusions are not based on national security concerns, but instead a policy objective of making federal employees easier to fire and political animus against federal sector unions.’”
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter exempted the Office of Intelligence Support from the Department of the Treasury. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan exempted the Office of Intelligence within the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Trump’s order will strip the union of 12 collective bargaining agreements made with nearly 12 departments or agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, which was set to run through September 2027.
The order, with Office of Personnel Management guidance, similarly instructs the IRS Office of Chief Counsel, the Department of Energy, the Federal Communications Commission, HHS, EPA and several other agencies to disregard their bargaining agreements with the union.
The union argues that none of the excluded agencies have any role in national security that would warrant such exclusions under the clear language of the statute.
“The executive order plainly punishes NTEU for its legal challenges to this administration’s actions, cancelling, as relevant here, twelve of NTEU’s collective bargaining relationships, including NTEU’s largest and longest one at the IRS,” the union wrote.
Lukas Ventouras, the New Deal Democrat running to replace MAGA Rep Nick LaLota on Long Island tildes last night that “Unions are the lifeblood of this country. Any person's attempt to dismantle and disempower unions, particularly those which protect workers doing our most essential government work, is as clear an indication of that person's lack of respect for the working class. Trump is no different. After a business career rife with the practice of stiffing workers, his political career has similarly been built upon a complete parasitic, and intentional desire to screw over the American worker. This is unsurprising, but still extremely dangerous. Trump is attempting to usurp several avenues of checks on his power, through ignoring judicial appointments, and disempowering the working class, believing he has a mandate to do so. It is up to the American people to send him a message in November of 2026, and take some power back.”
Comments