Trump wants to destroy unions. A general strike is the only way to fight back [View all]

03-29-2025 POV

Now is not the time for organized labor to sit in conference rooms with their lawyers.

BY
Hamilton Nolan

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.

FULL story: https://www.fastcompany.com/91308349/trump-wants-to-destroy-unions-a-general-strike-is-the-only-way-to-fight-back

This piece first appeared on labor journalist Hamilton Nolan’s Substack, How Things Work.