It’s Time for a United Front to Take on Billionaire Rule

The plutocratic forces aligned against the working class don’t have a broad mandate for their assault, but they are projecting power by using the media to stoke fear and demobilize us. One clear target they are focusing on in an attempt to carve up the working class is the immigrant population. 

It would be a mistake to dismiss their attacks as merely smoke and mirrors. Rather, the media-inflated chaos is part of their plan, an effective way to control the narrative, literally rehashing old stories to incite fear. Last week, the Guardian published an article exposing how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is re-releasing decade-old press statements with new dates to give the impression that ICE was ramping up deportations close to Trump’s inauguration. It’s a common tactic of psychological warfare with historical echoes in this country’s past.

Kelly Lytle Hernández, a professor of history and African American studies at UCLA, told Politico ahead of Trump’s inauguration: ​“Strongly encouraging and frightening people into leaving will be a main strategy.” Up until 1929, Lytle Hernández has argued, immigrant workers could enter the United States without official permission, but then ​“Congress outlawed border crossings with the specific intent of criminalizing, prosecuting and imprisoning Mexican immigrants.” 

In the 1930s, historian Greg Grandin notes in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, anti-Mexican nativism allowed President Herbert Hoover to run for president on the promise of expulsion of Mexicans from the country, with intellectuals openly fretting about ​“racial replacement.” The head of the unemployment office in Los Angeles at the time wanted Mexican workers eliminated from the workforce, saying: ​“We need their jobs,” and offered as a solution deploying cops to set up high-profile raids ​“with all publicity possible and pictures,” a ​“psychological gesture” meant to ​“scare many thousand alien deportables.”

“There wasn’t a lot of work, so they wanted what little there was to go to citizens,” said one Mexican worker who spent two decades working in the country, according to historian Dana Frank’s book What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times. In Texas in 1932, a man threatened to blow up City Hall if jobs weren’t taken from Mexicans and given to white workers, writing to the mayor of El Paso: ​“Brother we passed the court house the other day. Look who was a clerk, a Mexican. A Mexican, can you beat that? In a white man’s place.”

According to Grandin, estimates put the figure of those who were forced to leave the country in the 1930s at between 300,000 to two million people — among them many U.S. citizens. In California’s San Fernando, as chronicled by Frank, a worker told a local Spanish-language paper how immigration officials ​“rode around the neighborhood with their sirens wailing and advising people to surrender themselves to the authorities. They barricaded all the entrances to the colonia so no one could escape,” said the worker describing the arrest of workers in lemon groves. ​“We the women cried, the children screamed, others ran hither and yon with the deputies in hot pursuit yelling at them that their time had come to surrender.”

In a cruelly ironic twist, repatriations and ethnic cleansing by deportation later created a labor shortage addressed by legally bringing into the United States millions of Mexican workers to work the agricultural fields, a cheap and highly exploitable labor source managed through the Bracero Program from the 1940s through the 1960s. 

The power of fear

“Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear,” said Trump in 2016. Performance is Trump’s métier, and inciting fear is the most common bit in his drama repertoire. As the political scientist and author Corey Robin has noted, ​“political actors use fear when there is a mismatch between their power-mongering and the capacity of the state. As is true of all performance on stage, fear is designed to amplify the voice of the actor, far beyond the confines of the theater. Contrary to what people think, the purpose of fear is not sadism or cruelty. It never has been. It is to compensate for a lack of state capacity.”

Then there’s what the historian Timothy Snyder has called ​“anticipatory obedience” and the imperative command: ​“Do not obey in advance,” which has been making the rounds on social media posts and countless news stories. But as M. Gessen argued in the New York Times on February 8, obeying in advance can be a perfectly rational response, as humans take responsibility for others and seek to avoid ​“collective hostage-taking.”

The example of collective hostage-taking is especially resonant for union members who organize collectively, as Gessen describes, ​“the phenomenon when individuals cannot be free to act because of a constant, credible threat of collective punishment. Collective hostage-taking is particularly insidious because it pits different sets of values against each other.”

As one worker recently wrote to me when asked to comment on a source of division in their union: ​“Unfortunately I have to think of the consequences for others. I’m not concerned with the impact upon myself, but others get blamed for my actions.”

Under these conditions, it’s critical to support any worker who speaks out and organizes within their union to refuse to bend the knee to Trump and Musk. Will rank-and-file workers defy their accommodationist leaders in unions that are going along with Trump’s plan to decimate the working class? And will labor leadership join together to resist these attacks, even when they’re trained on workers outside their own union’s membership like federal workers?

Weeks into Trump’s second term, we’ve already seen that he isn’t invincible and have witnessed the limits of executive power. Trump backtracked on his initial threatened tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Many of his executive orders are tied up in the courts. Thousands of people have rallied nationwide since Trump’s reelection to protest mass deportation sweeps, attacks on programs that acknowledge race and gender inequality (part of a right-wing effort to destroy the post-Civil Rights settlement, such as ending President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 ban on racial discrimination in federal employment or government contractors), and restrictions on transgender rights, including banning gender-affirming care for young trans people.

“The first days after Trump’s inauguration were the coldest days here in Chicago, and I don’t know if it was the bad weather or anti-immigrant threats they heard in the news, but people didn’t show up for work,” says Juan Vargas, a Teamsters Local 703 grocery worker. But one week later, he tells me in Spanish, ​“either people lost their fear or went back to work to afford to eat.”

While raids are still very much on people’s minds, immigrants in Chicago have had the support of a community and local political leadership that has largely stood against Trump’s threats of deportations, and workers are informing each other of their rights in the face of intimidation from ICE officials. Sanctuary cities like Chicago, complained Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, ​“are making it very difficult” because residents are ​“educated” about how to avoid immigration sweeps.

Workers’ centers like Arise Chicago, Chicago Community and Workers’ Rights, Centro Sin Fronteras, as well as unions including the Chicago Teachers Union and others have held numerous trainings since the presidential election to get residents prepared, building on what they learned and experienced during Trump’s first term in the White House.

Martin Unzueta from Chicago Community and Workers’ Rights says 60 Latino Teamsters from Local 703 attended the Know Your Rights trainings. Countless more training sessions have been held across the city.

Where the sticks of ICE agent intimidation won’t do the trick, the Trump team is bringing out the carrots to chip away at the workforce. Musk has offered bribes to federal employees to purge them from their government jobs, but only 20,000 have accepted the buyout, according to Axios. Jacob Morrison, member of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1858 in Huntsville, Alabama, says the annual churn rate is more than 100,000. In 2022 alone, according to the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, voluntary attrition from the civil service included 150,000 federal employees leaving the government, including 70,000 who retired and 77,000 who quit their jobs. 

The upshot? Rather than reduce the size of the federal workforce, Musk and his minions have actually so far helped grow federal union membership to the highest in its history to 321,000. AFGE has been recruiting new members to resist Musk’s attack while also picketing to prevent him from gaining unauthorized access to buildings and Treasury Department data and rallying on Capitol Hill. Where he has been foiled, Musk has upped the ante by threatening mass layoffs. 

Now the Trump administration is facing numerous lawsuits, including to block the so-called deferred resignation plan, and protests are starting to spread, such as the AFL-CIO and other major unions trying to repel Trump’s assault on the Department of Labor. But there’s no coherent pole of opposition in the labor movement or anywhere else, especially among the feckless and corporate-owned Democrats. Meanwhile, the far-right has cohered an insurrectionary vanguard of professional self-professed ​“revolutionaries.”

Musk thinks it’s a do-or-die moment for an oligarchic takeover of the U.S. government, and has brought in his twenty-something cost-cutting henchmen to lend axes: ​“This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have,” the neo-Nazi sympathizer said in December.

​“The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” said Vought in 2024 under the Biden administration. ​“Our adversaries already hold weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us.”

The truth today is the opposite — the struggle we face is between worker power and billionaire rule. Vought and his cronies have hijacked the government, but they’ve also outlined how we can fight them: ​“The hour is late and time is of the essence to expose the charade, rally the country… and seize every leverage point to arrest the damage,” said Vought.

We are living through a moment in which the economic and political spheres are more tightly joined than ever with corporate capture of both parties, creating an opening as barriers between the two spheres disintegrate and the unity of corporate and state power melds into what can only be described as an oligarchy.

“At this point in any argument like this one, the question arises of what should be done and, more critically, what can be done.” wrote New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on February 5. ​“The sad answer is not that much. Those with the direct institutional power to slam the brakes lack the will and those with the will lack the power.” This may be true when it comes to the political establishment, but there is another potential source of power: the labor movement, where the resistance must be one of polarized classes, workers vs. the bosses.

“Attacking immigrant workers hurts the entire working class, as employers take advantage of the fear caused by threats of deportation to undermine wages and working conditions, and weaken unions,” said the United Electrical Workers in a statement. ​“The actions of Trump and his billionaire supporters have already begun to generate popular resistance, and we can expect to see more. The labor movement needs to play a key role in channeling that anger into an effective fightback.”

Opposition time

The labor movement is facing an existential crisis, but it does have leverage. There’s no other organization of the working class with a membership base of 14 million in key industries that can disrupt the economy, and a war chest as plentiful as the labor movement’s coffers today. We know that any resistance requires organization. And the labor movement is best positioned to provide it — in coalition with other progressive forces.

It’s high time for a united front coalition — a broad working-class movement that fights for all workers, welcoming everyone, regardless of gender or immigration status. What’s needed is nothing short of a coalitional bloc premised on organized labor’s highest values and unifying ethos: An injury to one is an injury to all. The question is which unions will step up and take on the mantle of leadership.

In their book Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce offer a set of strategies rooted in the history of past struggles for a new generation of organizers. Among the various forms in which workers can wield power, Bhargava and Luce list solidarity and disruption, harnessing our strength in numbers and wielding a credible threat to shut things down. 

Rather than large noisy demonstrations with no clear aims, workers can take part in the types of actions that block traffic to prevent ICE from conducting workplace raids. If a private-sector employer is collaborating with ICE or discriminating against transgender workers, workers can throw up obstacles by mass strike action, shop-floor action and sabotaging the boss to prevent them from getting their way through hammering their profits, wresting power from them and prying free of their control. To counter the power of billionaires, we are going to ​“need strategies that chart a path [workers and their communities] can travel, from the world as it is to the world as it could be.” The difficult path we must traverse is from an America First to a Workers First world.

That’s going to require unlikely alliances across the working class rooted in a solidarity strong enough for workers to act together in sufficient numbers to disrupt the status quo. Tactically, because we don’t have enough power in numbers, we’ll have to work alongside broader liberal formations like Indivisible, a volunteer-driven group of progressive Democrats, as well as loose online groupings such as #BuildtheResistance.

This coalition will also require peeling away support from MAGA, either when Trump’s supporters become disaffected or when we make it too costly for them to continue to align with a president that’s all in for the super rich. Drawing them in will require an orientation to class-struggle politics. Musk and his billionaire pals represent everything that is wrong with capitalism, in which the relationship between workers and bosses is one of domination and exploitation, which grinds us down every day, leaving us overworked, underpaid and unfree.

That capitalist system has been the daily experience of workers for far too long. But it’s now turbocharged into an extreme version of political oligarchy, in which bosses are looting the federal government for parts and threatening to destroy the livelihoods of millions without as much as a pretense about democracy. They know they can’t survive under real democracy, so they’re ready to abandon it. It would be foolish to chalk up what’s going on to a defeatist lament of ​“same as it ever was.” It’s not. Workers didn’t vote for a billionaire takeover of their lives at work and in society. ​“They voted specifically to lower the cost of living,” Bouie reminds us. ​“They certainly did not vote for a world where the president’s billionaire ally has access to your Social Security number.”

Pointing to one of the greatest struggles for freedom in the nation’s history, Bhargava and Luce write, ​“the abolitionist fight was complicated and messy, and involved alliances of unlikely subjects. Slavery ended in the United States through the actions of people with a wide range of motives and positions. Such unlikely alliances will be necessary today.” The organizing that we must undertake will require us to ​“assess what sources of power are available” to us, and ​“what strategies are possible given the context.”

This moment calls for a broad coalition that knits together an anti-billionaire revolt from below. We need to peel away the soft core of persuadable voters who cast a ballot for Trump. While the AFL-CIO has so far failed to coordinate mass actions nationwide to stop Trump’s assault on the working class, it’s not for nothing that the federation is collecting stories to put worker faces on the attacks from Trump and his billionaire cabinet, and has created the ​“Department of People Who Work for a Living,” as an organized response to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Federal workers organizing across unions through the Federal Unionist Network (FUN) have called for a national day of action on February 19. ​“We are nurses, scientists, park rangers, protectors of our country, researchers, and attorneys who serve our communities every day,” FUN wrote in an email on February 10, announcing the day of action. ​“If we speak out together, we can make it clear to the public why the Trump administration’s attack on our jobs is designed to make all of our lives worse, all to benefit billionaires like Elon Musk.”

Higher education workers are holding a strategy session on February 13 in the face of illegal budget cuts, including to the National Institutes of Health. ​“The billionaire class is waging a war on workers, putting our nation’s healthcare, research, education, and jobs at risk,” the cross-union group called Labor for Higher Education, which is organizing under the broad banner of ​“Hands off our healthcare, our research, our jobs,” recently wrote on its website.

We need to come together to exert power over the billionaires who have captured the federal government. Educators are coming together locally to defend themselves and their students and in the process are building a movement infrastructure that could be used to fight back. ​“We believe this is a crucial moment for CTU and allies to bring together a number of large locals and community organizations who are strategically situated in key sectors and geographies,” says Jackson Potter, CTU’s vice president. ​“There is a distinct possibility that May 1, 2025 could resemble the movement moment that we saw on May 1, 2006, when 400,000 people marched in Chicago [for worker and immigrant rights].” 

In late January, Homan vented his frustration on national TV about how well organized workers and communities are in Chicago. ​“Hundreds of schools have mobilized walk-ins and sanctuary teams to fight back against the Trump attack,” Potter tells In These Times. ​“In order to spur our defense of immigrant rights, civil rights and labor rights, we are working to help anchor a convening in March with unions facing contract expirations and groups planning May Day marches, to surface shared demands, tactics and solidarity.” The United Electrical Workers are also part of the effort. 

But we also need a national pole of opposition where partisans of labor’s troublemaking wing can come together to make sense of how immigrant workers, trans workers, Black workers on a ​“DEI Watch List” and other targets of the billionaires aren’t faced with the blame for austerity budgets nor for corporate decisions to offshore jobs. 

From below

We may be in the beginning of a new movement upsurge, which opens up both new dangers and new possibilities. The dangers include an onslaught of repression, co-optation and absorption by stronger coalition partners, which could lead to a large yet unaccountable organization capable of throwing its weight around to divert the public’s will to fight into political dead-ends, including running cover for the feckless and corporate-dominated Democratic Party, stifling the flames needed to broaden movement disruption. It’s a fraught dynamic to build power. But there are also possibilities to jumpstart new cross-union political vehicles of worker power from below. 

To take advantage of the possibilities, we need to expand public debate on how we fight back, which in turn can build the capacity of organizers to generate strategy on the basis of their rank-and-file experiences fighting the boss. In Labor Notes, UE organizer Mark Meinster argued that moments of upsurge are not usually led by the top national leaders, but a small minority of militant labor unions ready to take action because they are independent from the mainstream.

“So where does organizing capacity come from in an upsurge?” Meinster asked. ​“Historically, three places: a) the minority of unions willing to take militant action, b) new formations that come together during the upsurge, such as the new CIO industrial unions in the 1930s, and c) people fighting for profound changes in society, such as the civil rights movement of the 1960s, socialists in the 1930s, or anarchists in earlier periods.”

Opposition efforts will have to emerge from workers themselves. UPS Teamster John Elwardsaid he discussed an idea with a UNITE HERE organizer to hold mass membership meetings to bring together local union members. ​“The idea is to build rank-and-file power rather than just officers or delegates at a labor council,” wrote Elward on the social media platform X. ​“Labor councils are incredibly important, but we need members to build solidarity across the ranks rather than be isolated and misinformed about labor issues.”

“Holding open membership meetings for all union members across sectors in geographic locations is a great idea to build credibility again with our members and re-teach the values of solidarity,” responded Jimmy Williams, Jr., president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.

We need to be teachers and learners in schools of class struggle. And that begins with members feeling less isolated. ​“UFCW Local 663, like many union locals, is an amalgamated behemoth representing tons of different employers,” says Paul Kirk-Davidoff, a steward at Seward Community Co-op in Minneapolis. ​“When I was working at a food co-op, we started hosting bonfires where we would invite other union co-op workers. We used this to plan out our contract campaigns, and to build connections at the rank-and-file level. My friend works at a small suburban chain and has taken the mantle of leading these. His partner is a talented artist and they make lots of fun buttons together. We have started contract negotiations and he has held several get-togethers to hang out and make art. We’re at square one so making the union more than just a contract at your shop is critical. I’m extremely proud of the work that all of us youngsters in this union have done to form connections. We’re all pissed off and lots of us are looking for a place to fight back; by reviving a union culture, we’re opening up that space.”

To create a broad base of class fighters, we need to massively scale up more of what Kirk-Davidoff describes. As Mark Brenner wrote in Labor Notes in 2010, ​“if labor’s going to find our own way — and bring everyone who’s been steamrolled by corporate America along with us — we need to rethink: what is it that makes a union strong?…The work ahead of us is simply too much for smart staffers to handle it all. It requires an exponential increase in the number of members who have authority to develop strategy and take action.”

International solidarity is another component of worker strategy as bosses seek to polarize us along nationalist lines. ​“Grocery stores get food from across the world,” says Kirk-Davidoff. ​“I take note of where my meat and seafood comes from, and track it. Our crab legs mostly come from Newfoundland, which has a strong food processing union, the FFAW. When the tariffs were announced, I sent an email to the union rep for the plant where they process our crab legs and got in touch. If the tariffs actually go through, it will be cool to see where we can go with this connection.”

Another point of discussion and connection is how to prepare for May Day 2028, the call by the United Auto Workers to align contracts for a potential general strike. ​“Cross-union efforts that bring members together to decide and wage their electoral strategy could take this work even further, helping grow a class-wide vision,” Keith Brower Brown of Labor Notes wrote recently. ​“The run-up to May Day 2028 could build that kind of multi-union, member-led political discussion, even for unions who don’t align their contracts in time.”

One key division to tackle through political education is between native-born and immigrant workers. In New York, Trump and Musk might strip building trades members of thousands of jobs if they follow through on threatened cuts to infrastructure spending, which includes more than 500 projects in the state, worth $22 billion. That’s an opening to reframe the conversation among union members in the building and construction trades from immigrants taking jobs to bosses rigging the economy to devastate their livelihoods. 

Recent social movement protests in defense of immigrant workers or other causes have had little staying power and have dissipated in the face of counterattacks by elites to hold on to their concentrated power. But social protests can build layers of organizers even in defeat. Previous immigrant struggles have produced leaders ready to fight back. Now the question is: how do we cohere veterans from these past fights and newer ones into lasting rank-and-file leadership?

When discussing immigration policy, we must understand immigrant workers in their class relationship to their employers — because the fundamental dynamic is about the economic power imbalance between workers and bosses — rather than framing their plight solely as a wedge issue about immigrant rights. Instead, their labor struggles should be placed at the center of the fight against billionaire rule.

That’s where boycotts of employers can play a role. If Trump and billionaire CEOs hamper the functioning of the National Labor Relations Board, we should organize strategic secondary boycotts—legal caveats be damned. That’s us wielding economic power, moving as fearlessly and audaciously as Musk’s illegal sacking of federal workers. Let’s draw inspiration from the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott in the 1960s, made possible because agricultural workers aren’t covered by federal labor law, as well as the unsanctioned red state teacher strikes in 2018 and a more recent illegal strike wave in Massachusetts.

For example, we can help make the Tesla brand synonymous with Nazi apologetics and Musk the poster child for CEOs nationwide trampling on workers’ rights. Musk needs to be the face of a public backlash, holding him responsible for all calamities that befall workers and their communities from the gutting of the government. Some of this work is already starting to be done. According to Politico, new polling show’s Musk’s popularity ​“in the toilet,” which could help hinder his efforts on behalf of the Trump administration. And his more controversial actions are having economic consequences in the United States and across Europe, including Sweden where Tesla mechanics have been on strike for more than a year. In California, the U.S.’s largest market for electric vehicles, the company’s sales have plummeted with the company’s operating profit down 23 percent. In Germany, sales dropped by 59 percent as Musk told the country’s population to get over their ​“past guilt” over Nazi-era crimes against humanity, andTesla’s market share in the country is down from 14 percent to 4 percent.

Ending billionaire rule

Like the abolitionists of the 19^th century arrayed against the planter class, today we need to break the economic, ideological and political foundations of billionaire rule. ​“The international movement, with enslaved and formerly enslaved people at the heart, fought to pass laws, boycotted consumer products, rallied in mass meetings, petitioned legislatures, marched, engaged in mass public education, ran away, took up arms, operated underground railroads, and created a new common sense about the evils of slavery,” write Bhargava and Luce. 

Our approach needs to be similarly multifaceted — narrative shifts through storytelling, lawsuits, direct action on the shop-floor, sabotage, mass strikes, boycotts, political education, large nationwide marches — adjusted for the present context. Not everyone who opposes this corporate takeover of American society will be our friends. Some in the united front will certainly disagree with us on some issues, just as many abolitionists were racist, and many anti-fascists were pro-capitalist. We may have to work in alliance with them, but we can’t compromise our values or goals.

Wherever Trump’s and Musk’s attacks have galvanized the working class to fight the billionaires, we need to welcome them into the fight. The right’s strategy is attrition. Ours is additive. May a million opposition efforts bloom, from the ground up. It’s time for the labor movement to lead in building a majority bloc of the working class against billionaire rule.