Summary
Trump is nullifying federal employee union contracts negotiated in Biden’s final days.
Affected contracts include one with the Education Department ratified just before his inauguration. Trump cited a 2010 Supreme Court decision to justify his stance but did not provide a clear legal basis.
Federal employee unions, representing 800,000 workers, vowed legal action, calling Trump’s move unlawful intimidation.
This continues Trump’s prior efforts to weaken job protections, with additional plans to reclassify and lay off civil servants.
Throw out the Union contact? Then union members need to… go on strike. That’s the power they have, and the only reason we’ve been able to get some worker protections.
Federal workers are usually barred from striking by law, see Reagan and the ATC union of any police union.
According to US history and labor unrest, the police will side with politicians and wealthy. I wonder how many workers will continue to wave around the thin blue line flags after they get asses kicked.
That’s also pretty damn close to what Trump genuinely wants - for everyone currently doing the work to quit. That way he can install lackeys across the board.
Strikes normally work because the other side wants something - usually the business owner wants labor to create a product. That isn’t the case here.
I’m not saying it’s pointless, but the classic strategies will need to be rethought.
Trump, and the Republicans in general, seriously underestimate just how much stuff the US government actually does, and how much institutional knowledge is required to do it. A widespread federal worker strike would be disastrous for them, and trying to replace all of those people with lackeys would be even more disastrous, because none of them would have the slightest clue what they are doing. And yes, I’m well aware that the Republicans are trying to sabotage the government, but going about it this way would have the opposite effect; everything coming crashing to a halt overnight would drive home to voters, in a really big way, just how much it is that the government actually does for people.
This plan only works if employees are indeed replaceable cogs. The thought is, “If employees quit, then we can simply replace them all”. “Unskilled labor” as it were. This assumption is common in management circles.
There’s also the not-so-secret goal of dismantling the government from the inside. The Republicans have been openly running with that one for 45 years
unions around the country need to join in sympathy strikes
Sympathy strikes are illegal in the US. Not saying wildcat strikes wouldn’t be justified, but there is a deliberate policy to undermine this type of broader solidarity.
Who cares if they are illegal, they want us to be afraid. I’d say do the stikes, what they gonna do arrest everyone in the country?
This, at this point we’re uhh… kinda… fucked
I mean honestly, this country has needed a good general strike for a long fucking time, for a lot of reasons.
What we need is labor to group together and start buying their own courts and judges.
I suspect that funding worker organizing would yield greater results
Half the unions will be dissolved due to lack of work shortly, anyway.
Are there enough lackeys? If quality falls through the floor as well, won’t it just further cement how dumb this whole strategy is? We may be taking lessons that it’ll take a few years to learn but…
Then they just privatize it and give it all to their wealthy buddies. For the things that they will even bother replacing… They want this shit to fail and they will replace most of it with nothing.
Creation is always more difficult than destruction, and none of our society was built without some kind of need. Most people like to build with others. Some take advantage of that spirit and become leaders for the sake of leading. Only morons would simultaneously covet power and actively work against people’s basic motivations.
I am working with others to actively fight should it come to that. But no matter what, we escaped the dark ages once, we’ll do so again.
Probably not, when you consider that he’s also about to deport a lot of your farm and construction workers…maybe he’ll find a way to get retirees, most of who will be his supporters, back to work.
They want to destroy the administrative state. A strike only helps them further that goal. They just won’t even bother negotiating.
The reason they have contracts is so they can take this to court instead of striking.
However, after this goes through a bunch of courts and ends up in the “supreme” one…