Trump is attacking the union rights and jobs of federal workers. ISG sat down with one of them to get their thoughts.
Q: Have you and your coworkers been impacted by the federal layoffs from the last few months?
A: All the things that have been going on, we really haven’t seen it. We’ve had the Musk emails, the five-bullet-point list of accomplishments. We had to do that for about a month. They took the union dues off payroll, that was like the only thing noticeable.
Q: Has the union leadership done anything?
A: At the local level, there’s been no communication or visible effort on the union’s part. It’s almost as if the union does not exist, where I’m at anyway.
Q: Should non-union workers be concerned by the attacks on federal workers’ unions?
A: Definitely. The union is their best option for maintaining their rights as workers in the short to mid-term. Trump’s attacks on unions are a textbook case of class warfare. It’s to destroy the remaining apparatus for working people to protect themselves from the wealthy. The days of being passive about politics are up. The rights and livelihoods of people are being threatened.
Q: Is there a price to pay for inaction?
A: There is, and it’s dire. People are having a hard time now. It’s nothing compared to what is to come. If they’re actively going after your means to organize, it means they plan to do things that would make you want to go on strike.
Q: How did we get here? How is Trump able to get away with these maneuvers? Are the Democrats any solution to Trump?
A: The failure of the working class to declare political independence from the wealthy. We keep using the existing “political parties” to solve our problems, but the results are always the same. We still stick to those same choices and shun third parties. It’s a form of collective madness. The incremental changes that solely benefit the wealthy at the expense of workers over many decades has brought us Trump. The failure of the American left to stick to a coherent and disciplined program that centers around this universal dilemma that the working class faces presented no popular alternative to scapegoating that the right eventually employed. The slow erosion of civil liberties in the name of “national security” since 9/11 is going to make the task of the working class even more difficult.
The Democratic Party facilitated all of this. Liberal politics facilitated the rise of Trump. A lot of people focus on Trump as being like the worst aspect of this, and in truth, that’s not the case. Trump is a symptom of a much greater problem.
Q: If we did have a workers’ party, what do you think it would (or could) be doing right now to stop Trump?
A: If we had a functioning workers’ party, where the rank-and-file actually has involvement in the party, we could be organizing a general strike. If a large number of unions managed to get on the same page about the issue and actually coordinated and worked together, then they could be very effective. I think that different unions need to start communicating with each other and trying to formulate a plan. A large union or a union that is comprised of smaller unions like the AFL-CIO or something like that, something that is like an umbrella organization of unions, could help coordinate a strike that’s large enough to affect the economy. The longshoremen’s strike last year showed the power of just one union of 50,000 workers: they moved $3.5 billion in goods each day and won their strike after 3 days on picket lines.
Right now, the working class is completely disorganized. There’s no way of coordinating any effort universally to combat what’s happening. If we had a workers’ party, we would be able to do that. We would be able to do that type of coordination. We would have the resources to reach working-class people to do a general strike or to go even further than that.
Q: Why should workers care about socialism if they want to get rid of Trump?
A: It’s really the only way to fight Trump. Class warfare is a real thing. Everybody in society at some level knows that everybody is suspicious of the extremely wealthy, the billionaires, and the multi-millionaires. They have too much political power. People still occasionally talk about Citizens United, they don’t ever talk about McCutcheon v. FEC. But those Supreme Court decisions were pretty large in giving the capitalist class direct control over our government. There’s no aggregate spending limit on individual campaign contributions anymore, meaning there’s no there’s no cap-off point. It used to be $46,200 or something like that. Now it’s infinity.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party: they are non-democratic institutions; they’re corporations. You’re not going to have some sort of hero politician go in and save the working class from all this mess. You need to have the working class itself do the work. A new political party formed by the working class, where workers vote for candidates amongst themselves to run for office and party leadership.
Independent Socialist Group 