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Despite the decline of US global supremacy, US billionaires are trying to maintain their privileges and power at the expense of the US population, especially workers.

Only a fighting labor movement can defeat Trump’s attacks on workers

Die US-Billionäre versuchen trotz des Niedergangs der globalen US-Vorherrschaft ihre Privilegen & Macht auf Kosten der US-Bevölkerung und besonders der Arbeiter aufrechtzuerhalten





Only a fighting labor movement can defeat Trump’s attacks on workers

2136 2 minutes read



The following statement was issued by the Labor Department of the Party for Socialism and Liberation 

On Thursday, March 27th, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled the Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Programs. The executive order calls for the termination of union contracts for over 700,000 federal workers and strips these workers of the right to organize and collectively bargain moving forward. This sweeping and unlawful executive order targets more than 30 agencies from the Department of Veteran Affairs to the Department of Justice to over half a dozen subdivisions of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency and more. 

Trump’s decision to strip union rights from nearly a million federal workers under the guise of “national security” is the sharpest attack he has made on the labor movement to date. It is not only an attack on the entire labor movement but on the working class as a whole. 

By signing this executive order, Trump is taking a sledgehammer to the federal departments that administer healthcare for veterans, maintain our public health apparatus, keep our rivers and air clean, and ensure the food we eat is free of disease. In sum, Trump is waging a direct assault on every protection and service working class people rely on to survive day to day. 

The Trump administration will not stop with this attack on federal workers. Trump and his billionaire backers are building toward the elimination of the right to organize in every part of the workforce. When Ronald Reagan fired the striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in August of 1981, it was an attack that marked the beginning of a broad assault on unions in the United States – one that the labor movement has still not recovered from. We are facing an even more consequential moment now. We cannot meet that moment with business as usual. The labor movement as we know it will only survive if it fights for its existence. 

This fight will take many forms, but it cannot be limited to court challenges and phone calls to politicians. Luckily, some union leaders are beginning to call for a more aggressive fightback.  Jimmy Williams, the General President of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), has called for the labor movement to show “unwavering resistance” to the administration. Sara Nelson, the President of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) has called for mass action, including strikes, in response to the administration’s attacks on all workers and on basic democratic rights. Calls like these recognize that the power of unions is in their millions of members who do the work that keeps the country running. Defending our unions means organizing these millions of workers in their workplaces in the streets to confront Trump’s billionaire agenda. Our unions were created through the mass struggle of millions of working people. This same type of mass struggle and bold action is how we will not only survive the attacks of the Trump administration but dramatically shift the political winds in favor of the majority. 

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