Donald Trump's Disastrous Scott Walker Moment
Trump and Elon Musk are making drastic cuts to the federal workforce. Unions are fighting back.
Sarah Jaffe ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARGARET VAIL PALMQUIST
On May 22, in 90-degree heat, a group of workers circled in front of Rep. Steve Scalise’s office in Metairie, Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans. The workers, members of the Federal Unionists Network (FUN) and Step Up Louisiana, were just one small fraction of a growing group of organized public employees fighting back against the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on the working class.
President Donald Trump wants a Scott Walker moment, a Ronald Reagan moment, perhaps even a Margaret Thatcher moment: a big, dramatic showdown with public employees in which he can appear all-powerful and mercilessly crush them.
Accompanied by Elon Musk, the president issued an executive order on March 27 to strip collective bargaining rights from more than 800,000 federal employees. The order uses a thin “national security” argument to justify busting the unions, but a fact sheet released with the announcement includes the line, “Certain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda.” This, then, is retaliation.
“President Trump’s latest executive order is a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants — nearly one-third of whom are veterans — simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies,” says Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, who was quoted in a March 31 statement from the union.
Some 67% of the federal workforce would lose the right to bargain under this order. According to Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect, “The number of workers covered under Trump’s order is so large that it would probably reduce the number of unionized American workers, both public- and private-sector, by somewhere between 5 and 10 percent.”
Agencies covered by the order — supposedly all focused on national security — include the departments of Justice, State, Defense, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Health and Human Services, as well as Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the General Services Administration, and more. Layoffs have already begun in what Elise Gould, at the Economic Policy Institute, notes is “the steepest uptick since the laying off census takers in 2020.”
She continues, “The decision of this administration to target the federal workforce is having its intended effect. Unfortunately, this is likely only the tip of the iceberg.”
Since the order dropped, battles have proceeded in the courts, most recently with a ruling May 21 that IRS workers could keep their union, and with an appeals court ruling May 16 that Trump’s move could go forward. But if history is any indication, the fight will also be waged in the workplace and in the streets, and the outcome will depend on how broad of a base the federal employee unions are able to organize.
“Even in those places where unions are pursuing the most aggressive and necessarily aggressive legal strategy, if it’s not being coupled with deep workplace organizing to give folks a sense of the long-term fight and strategy, then morale is in the pits,” said Chris Dols, a dredging expert with the Army Corps of Engineers and president of Local 8 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, and one of the founders of the FUN. “If workers aren’t confident to fight, they’re not going to fight. But the good news is that there are an ever-growing number of federal workplaces where folks are drawing this conclusion that they do have to figure out how to fight.” (Dols provided his job title and union membership for identification purposes only and spoke in a personal capacity, not on behalf of his employer or union.)
Workers in the FUN and across public sector unions have used the past couple of months and chaos to demonstrate their value to the U.S. public, conducting what I’ve called a massive public education project to show Americans what the federal government actually does. The image of Musk with a chainsaw has stuck precisely because it so perfectly captures the indiscriminate destruction that he’s wreaking.
To Joseph McCartin, historian and director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, that’s actually a reason for optimism: “I think these people have no idea of what they’re triggering here, and there are bound to be unintended consequences.” As Dols notes, “We’re the ones who make the government sausage.”
Dols also points out that any claims of “efficiencies” on the part of Trump or Musk, or indeed most conservatives, have always been offered in bad faith: “They don’t actually want regulations to be implemented efficiently. They don’t want regulations implemented at all.” Government employees, he argues, would actually be well-placed to find real efficiencies in government, to make their departments work better and to provide better services to the country.
It was Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker who provided the most recent blueprint for what Trump is doing. Elected in the “Tea Party” wave of 2010, Walker pushed through a budget repair bill, Act 10, which stripped state workers of collective bargaining rights over the protests of tens of thousands of workers. Alex Hanna, coauthor of the new book The AI Con, was co-president of the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) and a graduate student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the time, and notes, “Wisconsin was the testing ground to see if they could get away with this and see if you can pass muster in the courts.” She points out that Trump even imitated Walker’s carve-out for police and firefighters, who retain their rights.
The TAA kicked off what became a weeks-long occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol in February and March of 2011. Some 80,000 people came out to resist not just the attack on workers, but the way it had been done — by cutting off public debate and rushing through major policies. Union members from around the country poured into Wisconsin to fight, and there were similar protests and resistance in other states like Ohio and Indiana, which had put forward similar bills of their own. Fourteen Democratic members of the Wisconsin Senate left the state to deny the legislative quorum needed to pass the bill. The protests continued as Walker’s budget slashed the state government, cutting money from schools to lower taxes for corporations. It was an example, as I wrote in my book Necessary Trouble, “of what the Chicago Teachers Union would later call ‘being broke on purpose,’ eliminating a source of revenue in order to justify cuts [Walker] already wanted to make.”
Regardless, Republicans pulled the collective bargaining attacks out of the budget bill and pushed it through as a standalone bill in the middle of the night. Walker signed it in a private session. He later survived a recall attempt, though two Republican state senators did lose their seats to recalls. In contrast, in Ohio — where state law allowed for putting a bill itself up for referendum — unions and their allies were able to overturn the ban on collective bargaining.
Walker, like Trump, argued that his attacks on bargaining were an attempt to save money, but it is hard to argue that collective bargaining itself has a price tag. (Public workers, despite higher union density, tend to make less money than they might in the private sector.) Rather, these moves are about power: Bosses, in a factory or the federal government, try to crush, ban or restrict unions to maximize their own control.
The most important lesson here from the brutal defeat in Wisconsin is that labor needs to be a movement that fights for the whole working class. The return of the strike, beginning with Chicago teachers in 2012 and rippling across the country, notably in Republican-held states where teachers didn’t have the right to strike or in some cases even bargain collectively, has been important, Dols notes: “I think it’s probably safe to say … there’s probably at least one, maybe two orders of magnitude more workers who know how to really organize in a way that builds power.”
The echoes of the Act 10 fight are alive in Wisconsin, which is probably why Elon Musk spent some $25 million to elect a Trumpist judge to the state Supreme Court. But Wisconsin, in part of the sea change begun in that uprising, rejected Musk’s choice and handed Democrat Susan Crawford a sweeping victory. Crawford represented teachers’ unions in their suit against Act 10.
Scott Walker was inspired by Ronald Reagan, whose breaking of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981 sent the message that it was open season on labor unions in the United States. McCartin, who wrote the book on PATCO—Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers and the Strike that Changed America—notes that PATCO provided the blueprint for subsequent attacks on workers, but that Trump’s attempt to strip collective bargaining from most of the federal workforce “is many orders of magnitude more serious.”
The PATCO workers, like other federal workers, received the right to collective bargaining for the first time in 1962 thanks to an executive order from President John F. Kennedy. They did not have the right to strike (they are, in fact, forbidden to even advocate for the right to strike) and their bargaining was limited. Even so, they were part of a growing wave of public sector militancy that included a landmark (and illegal) postal workers strike in 1970.
By the time Reagan was sworn in as president — the first former union president to occupy the White House, having been head of the Screen Actors Guild — the air traffic controllers had built a powerful union through militant job actions — most of them work slowdowns and work to-rule—and were confident that Reagan wouldn’t crack down.
But PATCO hadn’t built the advance solidarity with the rest of the labor movement it would need to win an illegal strike, McCartin says. The union — made up of mostly white, male veterans — had even endorsed Reagan and was “pretty blunt about wanting a pay increase at a time when it was hard to ask for that.” But Reagan’s true agenda (rather like Trump) showed up in the early days of his administration, with budget cuts and anti-union appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. He played hardball with the PATCO negotiations, and when the workers struck on Aug. 3, 1981, Reagan gave them 48 hours to come back or be fired. They thought they were calling a bluff, and Reagan fired 11,345 workers, decertified the union, and banned them from government employment for life.
Historian Erik Loomis, in his book A History of America in Ten Strikes, calls the PATCO strike “the greatest disaster in American labor history.”
The labor movement, McCartin says, was in a difficult position because Reagan was popular and most of the public saw the controllers as greedy. But Dols wonders if this moment could be “PATCO in reverse.”
That strike was a moment of overconfidence on the part of labor, he says, that mirrors the overconfidence emanating from Trump and Musk. “It wouldn’t have been overreach if [PATCO] had the solidarity to win and the power to actually not only shut down the airlines, but also either spread it or otherwise make the political cost high enough that the Reagan administration made a different political calculation,” he adds.
The same goes for the federal workers now: If they can build the solidarity to win, they can turn this into a moment of overreach for the Trump administration that turns the tide for workers.
Trump might also be taking inspiration from a forebear across the ocean — former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in Britain, and her crushing of the miners’ union. Coal mining was nationalized in Britain, meaning that miners were, in fact, bargaining with the government over their conditions. The nationalized industry created what historian Ewan Gibbs — author of Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland (who was building on socialist historian E.P. Thompson’s writings) — describes as a “moral economy.” Part of the moral economy was that workers got some control over their jobs and the industry, which Thatcher was determined to end.
The miners struck in 1984 following the closures of a string of mines. They did get broad community support, but it was ultimately not enough to overcome the Thatcher administration’s determination to break the union and close the mines. Recently declassified papers show Thatcher planning to privatize the industry. “It was a calculated political decision,” Chris Kitchen, head of what remains of the National Union of Mineworkers, told me for my book, From the Ashes. “They wanted to fragment people.”
The defeat of the miners underscores the challenges of striking to beat a boss who wants to fire you. Joshua Clover, in Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, calls it the “affirmation trap,” in which workers are put in the position of mobilizing to keep their jobs. If Thatcher wants to shut the mines, if Elon Musk wants to take a chainsaw to the federal government, and you go on strike, you might just hand them the tools to fire you; if you beg to keep the workplace open, you’re also supporting your boss’ goals.
Workers have to be at least as strategic and thoughtful as they are militant in this moment; the lesson from PATCO is that militancy alone is insufficient.
But PATCO also offers some ideas for actions that could be effective. “I think if there is collective action, I don’t think these federal workers will make it easy to replace them,” McCartin says. “I would anticipate we’d see more sick-outs, slowdowns, ot“I think that what they’re doing right now is testing what they can reach and are they still confident? Yes,” Dols said. “I expect that they’re going to continue to pursue their maximum program, up to and including not just tax cuts for the billionaires and the corporate interests, but also privatization of large swaths of public lands or social security or veterans healthcare, widespread deregulation, but also the disenfranchisement of large numbers of voters to consolidate their power. Our job is to build the organizing capacity so that when they do go for those bigger targets, we actually have the capacity and reach to make that overreach something that they politically have to pay for.”her kinds of resistance, short of a traditional walkout.”
According to Dols, “Our maximum goal right now is to make this a sufficient political crisis that they lose complete control of it. And we help the public draw all the right conclusions from this, which is that it turns out federal workers not only are workers, but they’re extremely important workers who make sure that we all stay safe, healthy, that our rights are intact.”
The challenge before federal workers — and us — is massive, but so is the anger that Trump and Musk have provoked. “I’ve been very impressed with what the [FUN] has done in a very short time,” McCartin says. “Federal workers have never been more activated than they are now. And nor has there ever been a moment where the public was maybe more open to being educated about what its government does, what its public sector workers do, and if the workers themselves and their allies and the rest of the labor movement approach this in a smart and strategic way, I think they can organize, agitate and engage in some collective actions that will actually build support.”
The FUN called a day of action on April 5, and their mass organizing calls have pulled together tens of thousands of people, but Dols notes, “There’s union work that is accrued by addition, there’s union work that accrues by multiplication, and then there’s fractal organizing,” or organizing that moves by leaps and bounds to bring in new people. Bargaining for the common good is a strategy, begun in the wake of the Wisconsin uprising, that has the potential to connect people outside of the federal workforce to the workers who are under threat. Organizing explicitly on behalf of the broader public is a way for the federal workers to overcome the shortcomings of PATCO and to challenge the entire dog-eat-dog worldview at the root of Trumpism.
Because the federal sector is, in fact, many sectors — with workers who have counterparts in the private sector — there is potential for action that brings together public employees with private ones: air traffic controllers with flight attendants, say, like what happened in 2019 when Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA called for flight attendants to join the air traffic controllers who’d called out sick to end the government shutdown.
“Right now, everybody needs to become an organizer,” Dols says. “The FUN is about to be starting up massive trainings on how to be an organizer. And we’re hoping, in turn, to inspire the unions who just have more resources than us and more legitimacy and larger numbers.”
“I think that what they’re doing right now is testing what they can reach and are they still confident? Yes,” Dols said. “I expect that they’re going to continue to pursue their maximum program, up to and including not just tax cuts for the billionaires and the corporate interests, but also privatization of large swaths of public lands or social security or veterans healthcare, widespread deregulation, but also the disenfranchisement of large numbers of voters to consolidate their power. Our job is to build the organizing capacity so that when they do go for those bigger targets, we actually have the capacity and reach to make that overreach something that they politically have to pay for.”
It is impossible to predict exactly how things will shake out, but Dols concludes: “I don’t want to have any regrets that we didn’t do every damn thing we could to win.”
Sarah Jaffe is a writer and reporter living in New Orleans and on the road. She is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone; Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and her latest book is From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, all from Bold Type Books. Her journalism covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets, and her writing has been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets. She is a columnist at The Progressive and In These Times. She also co-hosts the Belabored podcast, with Michelle Chen, covering today’s labor movement, and Heart Reacts, with Craig Gent, an advice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism. Sarah has been a waitress, a bicycle mechanic, and a social media consultant, cleaned up trash and scooped ice cream and explained Soviet communism to middle schoolers. Journalism pays better than some of these. You can follow her on Twitter @sarahljaffe.
