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TRUMP AND MUSK’S WAR ON WORKERS  
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Joseph A. McCartin
February 21, 2025
Dissent Magazine - Online Article
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_ Organized labor and its allies can and must do much more to respond
to the crisis created by DOGE and the Trump administration. As the
nation’s largest employer, the federal government’s labor
relations policies inevitably ripple across the economy. _

Protesters rallying against the Department of Government
Efficiency’s funding freezes on research and higher education.,
Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA // New York Times

 

We are currently experiencing something no one living has seen before
in the United States. The events now unfolding are not merely the
result of an election shifting political power from one party to
another during a deeply partisan time. These events also herald more
than the end of the international liberal political order that evolved
from the New Deal to neoliberalism. We are witnessing a regime change
in America.

The new regime’s brazen aggression and extreme goals are most
visible in the frontal attack on the U.S. federal workforce, which has
witnessed the gutting or disabling of several agencies, layoffs at
virtually all others, the shredding of collective bargaining contracts
with federal unions, and an attempt to effectively break the civil
service.

The leaders of this effort told us long ago that this is what they had
in mind. In September 2021, J.D. Vance laid out this vision with
shameless candor [[link removed]] to
a conservative podcaster. What Donald Trump should do if he regained
office, Vance said, is “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat,
every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them
with our people.” And “when the courts stop [him],” he said,
“because [he] will get taken to court,” Trump should “stand
before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say the Chief Justice
has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.”

The arrival of this moment has brought the American labor movement to
a crossroads. Not since President Ronald Reagan broke the illegal air
traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 by firing and permanently
replacing the strikers has an administration’s treatment of federal
workers threatened to impact U.S. labor relations as broadly and
profoundly as the recent actions of President Donald Trump and Elon
Musk. Reagan’s breaking of the walkout by the Professional Air
Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) inspired a torrent of private
sector anti-unionism that saw employers break a host of prominent
strikes in the 1980s, dealing a devastating blow to the union movement
and hurting workers more broadly. Yet compared to the current
administration, Reagan’s approach to the PATCO strike was mild.

Trump and Musk’s actions are shaping up to be worse than Reagan’s
union busting, not only for federal workers, but also for workers
across America. As the nation’s largest employer, the federal
government’s labor relations policies inevitably ripple across the
economy, influencing how employers of all kinds behave. Not only do
they threaten to weaken unions, as Reagan’s breaking of PATCO did,
they jeopardize the entire edifice of workers’ rights erected over
more than a century.

Comparing the crisis the PATCO strike created for labor to the one
that workers and unions currently face is instructive. Doing so
reveals not only how much more dangerous the threat posed by Trump is,
but also how much more vulnerable Trump might become to a
well-organized, principled, and determined resistance, something that
never developed in 1981.

Neither PATCO nor Reagan anticipated at the outset just how important
a turning point in organized labor’s history their conflict would
become. As the only former union leader ever to win election to the
presidency, Reagan didn’t set out to provoke a confrontation with
PATCO, one of the few unions that had endorsed him in 1980. Rather, he
authorized his negotiators to offer more to PATCO than the government
had ever given to a federal union during bargaining. Unfortunately,
Reagan contributed to elevating unrealistic expectations among his
former supporters. When they staged an illegal strike in protest of
what they considered to be a low-ball offer, he gave them forty-eight
hours to return to work. When the vast majority refused, he fired
them. This move came as a relief to his conservative advisors who felt
he had offered too much to the union to begin with.

Even Reagan’s harshest critics had to admit that he was acting
within his powers under the law. Had Jimmy Carter still been president
he might well have done the same. After all, Carter’s Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) had drawn up the strike contingency plan
that Reagan’s people followed to break PATCO’s walkout. Reagan’s
amendment to Carter’s plan was his refusal to
rehire _any_ strikers long after their union had been broken. That
move burnished his reputation for toughness at the expense of the
nation’s air traffic control system, which still suffers from the
lingering effects of the mass firing.

It was his ability to pull off the dramatic, sudden erasure of 70
percent of a vital agency’s skilled workforce that proved most
inspiring to private sector employers. In the 1980s, they sought to
emulate Reagan. Many incited strikes by instituting draconian wage
cuts just to have the opportunity to replace their strikers. For a
decade, strike debacle after strike debacle played out for the copper
miners of Phelps Dodge, the meatpackers of Hormel, the operatives at
International Paper—causing many other workers to realize that they
had lost the ability to strike effectively. This realization drove
down the nation’s annual average of large work stoppages from 289 in
the 1970s to thirty-five in the 1990s. That decline signaled a
dramatic setback for bargaining power and opened the door to a new era
of growing inequality that put us on the road to the present moment.

Still, compared to Trump, Reagan was a union sympathizer who respected
the rule of law. Ironically, his decision not to rehire any PATCO
strikers was largely intended to warn Moscow’s leaders that they had
better not test his mettle, for if they did, he would show them no
more mercy than he had shown controllers whose lives were shattered by
being banned from the highly skilled profession for which they had
spent years training. As heartless as that act was, Reagan never
attempted to violate collective bargaining contracts in the federal
sector, nor did he question federal workers’ legislated union
rights. Indeed, his administration recognized a new air traffic
controllers’ union at the FAA before he left office. The National
Air Traffic Controllers Association exists to this day. And as
mean-spirited as Reagan was in his denigration of government, with
quips like “The nine most terrifying words in the English language
are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” such
sentiments constituted rhetoric more than policy: the number of
federal employees actually grew on his watch.

The contrast between the Reagan and Trump administrations are stark.
Trump is pursuing his attack on federal workers’ rights through a
“department” Congress neither created nor approved, Elon Musk’s
“Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). Musk’s minions
have rummaged through some of the most sensitive private information
the government possesses at agencies such as the Social Security
Administration. When Democratic lawmaker Robert Garcia challenged
Musk, Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia raised the
specter of investigating
[[link removed]] Garcia
for making threats against a government employee. In the meantime,
federal agencies have tossed aside collective bargaining agreements
with their unions and run roughshod over civil service regulations in
announcing mass layoffs and unilateral changes in remote work
policies.

Trump has also outdone Reagan in his hostility to the key federal
agencies charged with protecting workers’ rights: the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
(EEOC), and the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA). Reagan
appointed staunch conservatives to those agencies—including naming
Clarence Thomas as chair of the EEOC—and by doing so weakened their
protective powers. But Reagan never claimed the right to fire
Carter’s appointees in the middle of their terms of service. By
contrast, Trump has removed duly appointed and Senate-confirmed
members of each of these bodies, effectively disabling their function
and seeking to ensure that henceforth such agencies will never act
with any degree of independence. In the meantime, Musk’s SpaceX has
joined with other employers to contest the constitutionality of the
NLRB in federal court.

As the unprecedented attack on the NLRB and the EEOC already
indicates, Trump’s current war on workers’ rights will not remain
confined to the federal sector. Considering the speed, breadth, and
radicalism of the current administration’s moves, its lasting impact
is likely to be many orders of magnitude more harmful than anything
Reagan did.

Trump can inflict more damage in part because U.S. workers are more
vulnerable to a rollback of their rights today than they were in the
1980s. The potential bases of resistance have all been dramatically
weakened over the past forty-four years. In relative terms, today’s
union movement is less than half the size it was when Reagan broke
PATCO. Unions are also more geographically isolated (a state like
Alabama has seen union membership plummet from over 20 percent of its
workforce to under 7 percent today). Our political system is far more
polarized on labor issues now than it was in 1981 with only one party
committed to upholding the last century’s accumulation of labor laws
that were enacted with bipartisan support. A new class of
multi-billionaires bends its knee to the far right. Meanwhile, the
U.S. Supreme Court, whose misguided ruling in _Trump v. United
States_ offered a broad cloak of immunity
[[link removed]] to
the president, is more hostile to workers’ rights than any court in
a century
[[link removed]]. The
court’s tendency to slow-walk any decision that challenges Trump
means that plenty of irreversible damage will likely ensue before it
ever weighs in.

Where does this leave today’s labor movement and its allies? In
answering that question, it is instructive to recall how labor
responded to Reagan in 1981.

Organized labor was caught flat-footed by Reagan’s breaking of
PATCO. The union neither sought nor received support from the AFL-CIO
prior to launching its disastrous strike. AFL-CIO leaders were at a
pre-scheduled meeting on August 3, 1981, when they heard that
PATCO’s walkout had begun. They immediately worried about its
potential impact on the entire movement. After all, the strike was an
illegal action waged against a popular president who had been elected
by a landslide and then earned bipartisan sympathy by having survived
an assassination attempt six months earlier. At the same time, PATCO
strikers seemed tone deaf. They were asking for large wage increases
at a time when other unions were making concessions in their contract
negotiations and taxpayers were staggering under the weight of
stagflation. Union leaders knew that many workers, union or not,
believed Reagan was right to give an ultimatum to the strikers.

Facing this situation labor leaders believed they could neither
abandon their fellow unionists by condemning the walkout as a
strategic blunder nor fully commit their organizations—many of whose
members were divided on the issue—to a full-scale resistance to
Reagan’s firing of the strikers. To be sure, AFL-CIO leaders marched
on picket lines and their members participated in demonstrations at
airports across the county. Sporadic acts of civil disobedience
occurred in some places, but they were not organized by labor’s top
leaders. Those leaders instead concentrated on organizing the massive
Solidarity Day march on Washington, on September 19, 1981. It was the
largest protest march that had yet been held in the capital’s
history, but when the marchers went home afterward nothing had
changed. Reagan had broken PATCO and the union movement could manage
little more than to raise the chant that union busting was disgusting.

The psychological impact of that defeat on the labor movement and its
opponents alike was profound. Labor’s inability to marshal
significant resistance to the PATCO firings helped inspire business to
bust unions with gusto in the 1980s. In some ways, the labor movement
never fully recovered from that era of retreat.

Today’s labor movement and its allies face a similar moment of
truth. At stake in Trump’s attack on federal workers and unions is
more than the fate of one federal agency’s workforce, as was the
case in 1981. At stake now is more even than the fate of all federal
workers, or of American workers’ rights in the public or the private
sector. At stake now is the very character of our government and the
norms of democratic governance that have been constructed over
decades. At stake now is whether we will have any labor movement at
all to speak of ten years from now.

On February 19, I joined a rally organized by the Federal Unionists
Network [[link removed]] (FUN) outside the
headquarters of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as
part of a national day of action. FUN—a grassroots network that
includes union members from multiple unions across the federal service
and around the country—is one of the most inspiring efforts to
emerge over recent weeks. There were a thousand spirited protesters on
hand, and they were clearly frustrated with Democratic leaders. When
Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen told the rallygoers that he stood
in solidarity with them, they interrupted him with cries of “Shut
down the Senate!” When he concluded his remarks, they chanted “Do
something!” I added my voice to their chant but, as I left, I was
haunted by the recollection of many such gatherings that popped up in
support of PATCO forty-four years ago to no avail.

As happened in 1981, today’s labor movement thus far appears unsure
of how to respond to an emergency situation. In many ways, this is
quite understandable. Few could have anticipated how fast this crisis
would emerge and how dangerous it would quickly become. To this point
labor is doing the things that are in its comfort zone: filing
lawsuits, sponsoring rallies, and launching initiatives like the
AFL-CIO’s “Department of People Who Work for a Living
[[link removed]]” to counter DOGE.

But labor and its allies can and must do much more. The conditions
that inhibited unions in 1981 don’t exist now. Unions are riding a
wave of popularity they have not seen since the days when Reagan was a
Democrat. Unlike Reagan, Trump was not elected by a landslide, nor is
he broadly popular. The public has none of the animosity toward
federal workers today that many felt toward PATCO members, whom many
saw as arrogant. While the public blamed controllers for flight
delays, those whose federal contracts, grants, and services are being
sacrificed amid these cutbacks have only Trump and Musk, a
multi-billionaire who cares more about occupying Mars than addressing
the concerns of everyday Americans, to blame. Public opinion
is _not_ clamoring for the complete dismantling of our government
that is now underway. Perhaps most important, this time it is the
president, not the workers he is targeting, who is breaking the law,
and early public opinion polls reflect this realization
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These circumstances give labor and its allies, including non-federal
workers, permission to escalate their tactics in a fight that must be
waged not only for the future of the movement but for that of the
nation as well. The context of this fight makes escalation possible;
the enormous stakes make escalation necessary. What we are currently
doing is simply not enough. Any escalation should of course be framed
in ways that broaden support for the struggle to save our government
and its workers from Musk’s chainsaw. But this is no time for
sticking to our comfort zones.

_[JOSEPH A. MCCARTIN is the director of Georgetown
University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor
[[link removed]], author of Collision Course: Ronald
Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers and the Strike that Changed
America, and president of the Labor and Working-Class History
Association [[link removed]].]_

* Donald Trump
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* Elon Musk
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* Working Class
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* Trade Unions
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* Government Workers
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* federal employees
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* government employee unions
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* Neoliberalism
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* regime change
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* collective bargaining
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* civil service
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* union busting
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* rule of law
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* Resistance 2.0
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* Trump 2.0
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* Labor Movement
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