The Answer to Trump's Anti-Worker Shutdown Is Solidarity and Labor Militancy

[Omaha Steve]

The GOP’s assault on federal employees amid the government shutdown is far more extreme than Reagan’s PATCO union busting. The labor movement needs a more effective response this time.

Conor Lynch October 9, 2025

A palpable sense of dread gripped many federal employees last week as the government inched closer to a shutdown and the Trump administration explicitly threatened to carry out another round of mass layoffs, effectively turning civil servants into bargaining chips.

After eight months of periodic purges that began with Elon Musk​’s Department of Government Efficiency, the ​“never-ending nightmare” that federal workers have been through this year shows no signs of waning, with Russell Vought, President Donald Trump​’s budget director, apparently seeing the shutdown as a perfect opportunity to inflict more trauma on ​“deep state” employees. With the shutdown now in full swing, Vought has promised that the White House will begin firing federal employees within ​“a day or two.”

Unfortunately, federal workers have had few options to defend themselves from the president’s vindictive crusade against them. In addition to circumventing civil service laws and ignoring decades of precedent, Trump and his top officials have also waged an extraordinary campaign to crush the very organizations that are meant to protect employees and provide them with a voice in their own workplace.

Last March, the president launched what has been described as the largest union-busting campaign in the country’s history when he issued an executive order instructing agency heads to cancel collective bargaining agreements for more than a million federal employees under the pretext of national security. Since then, he has issued several more orders to expand the number of targeted agencies and workers, while about half a million federal employees have seen their collective bargaining contracts terminated. At the time of this writing, union contracts have been canceled for employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, General Services Administration, U.S. Coast Guard and departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs. On top of this, the administration has ceased collecting union dues via automatic payroll deduction, forcing unions like the American Federation of Government Employees to implement an alternative system to collect dues.

FULL story: https://inthesetimes.com/article/trump-anti-worker-shutdown-labor-militancy-reagan-patco