“National Security” Threatens the Working Class
Trump’s latest Executive Order is vivid proof that 1) class war from above is actively happening, and 2) the cudgel of "national security” is its greatest weapon. It’s always been thus.
Around a million US workers just lost their right to collectively bargain for safety, protection, and wages. With the stroke of a pen, Trump cancelled union contracts for roughly 75% of federal union employees and close to 70% of the entire federal workforce. It is the largest union-busting move in my lifetime, possibly in history.
Trump’s declaration fully ends collective bargaining rights for:
Department of Defense
State Department
Veterans Affairs
Department of Justice
Department of Energy
Partially ends collective bargaining rights for:
Department of Homeland Security
Treasury Department
Health and Human Services
Department of Interior
Department of Agriculture
And declares federal labor law no longer applies to:
The International Trade Administration
International Trade Commission
Environmental Protection Agency
National Science Foundation
US Agency for International Development
Federal Communications Commission
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission
General Services Administration
Flagrantly illegal. The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act has a narrow “national security exemption” against workplace unions, but no competent lawyer would be able to stretch it to apply to so many workers and agencies. National security is once again the magical rhetoric to justify the unlimited accumulation and use of state power. The reasoning the Trump EO cites is unserious but closer to the truth:
Certain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda.
The largest Federal union describes itself as “fighting back” against Trump. It is widely filing grievances to block Trump policies.
For example, VA’s unions have filed 70 national and local grievances over President Trump’s policies since the inauguration.
We should take note that Trump’s war on unions is very explicitly also a war on military veterans—a protected class in American society and a crucial variable in determining whether the United States ever recovers its democracy. The EO doesn’t just eliminate collective bargaining contracts for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA); it cites the VA’s petitions against the Trump administration (for violating labor law) as a key motivation for de-unionizing the federal workforce!
The AFL-CIO issued a heartening statement of solidarity of action:
The elites who are doing policy on behalf of MAGA voters are the enemy of the working class. Everything the Trump administration has done has made life more expensive, scarier, and more precarious for the majority of the country. He’s paralysed the National Labor Relations Board. And now he’s destroying one of the country’s largest unions. If he can take away their labor rights, he will do the same to workers in the private sector, who are even more precarious.
But this is also part of a wider class war being waged by Trump-friendly oligarchs in partnership with ethnonationalists.
Everyone knows the United States is at war in more places than any country on earth. It has more overseas bases than any country on earth. It spends more on the military than any country on earth. And it is the most militarized democracy (if we still want to call it that) on earth.
Everyone also knows that the United States has a weak, highly fractured working class with few labor rights.
But what too few people understand is that this is not a coincidence—American militarism is a principal cause of America’s historically repressed labor movement. There are structural and opportunity-cost ways in which this is true, but using “national security” to directly justify labor repression is also tactic that US politicians, police, and privateers have made into a tradition the past 130 years.
I may need to expound on this further. In that case, more soon.
If you’re a federal worker who wants to fight back, get in touch with your union rep or plug in here: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/pledge-to-defend/.
Whether or not you’re a federal worker, unions across the country are trying to align their contract renegotiations for May Day 2028—a moment for either real bargaining concessions or a general strike, if events don’t accelerate things. You can sign your general strike card here.