Forced to work, and unable to strike: US federal workers need solidarity Anonymous The shutdown is

Forced to work, and unable to strike: US federal workers need solidarity
Anonymous

The shutdown is just the latest assault on our livelihoods. We need a reinvigorated labor movement at our backs

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Furloughed government workers and their supporters participate in a protest against the federal government shutdown on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Images

The longtime anti-tax activist and prominent Trump supporter Grover Norquist once said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” You don’t have to listen hard to hear the water running. As the government shutdown enters its second month, we are witnessing an unprecedented effort by the administration to starve out federal employees, decimate the agencies we compose, and undermine the very foundation of the civil service. Unprecedented – but not unexpected. From Trump’s campaign pledge to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, to his budget blueprint in 2017 proposing the elimination of 19 federal agencies ranging from the Chemical Safety Board to the National Endowment for the Arts, the president has been gunning for the federal sector for years. He implemented a federal hiring freeze in the first days of his term. Following that with a $1.5tn tax cut, Trump and congressional Republicans set the stage for budget shortfalls – and their attendant cuts to services – for years to come.

The president was less effective in his second year. Last summer, he aimed to gut what’s left of federal labor protections with three executive orders that were later largely struck down by the courts. These orders were paired with a proposal to eliminate or hollow out several agencies, consistent with the vision of the small-government fundamentalists that surround Trump. But, like the executive orders, Trump’s proposal remains only a proposal, without legislative support. Trump appears to see the shutdown as his opportunity to press on, outside of pesky legal constraints, to win the political fight against “big government”. Last week, the Daily Caller ran a piece from an anonymous “senior official in the Trump administration” that called on the president to continue the shutdown for “a very long time” in order to slash the federal workforce by “smoking out the resistance”. A long shutdown, the official argued, could demonstrate “that government is better when smaller”. Lest anyone get the impression that this “senior official” couldn’t get a hearing for this strategy with their boss, Trump shared the editorial with his 57 million Twitter followers.

Many federal workers are still in denial. Sure, we’re angry – especially those of us not getting paid. But there’s little sense that there’s anything we can do. In today’s political context, calling our congressional representatives is understood to be even less effective than it’s ever been. The painful and demoralizing truth for us federal workers is that we’ve never had great friends in Congress, no matter how many times we’ve called.

Since the 1970s, the erosion of the public sector has been overseen by both parties (one, undeniably, more enthusiastic than the other). And even during the prior decades, when the federal sector was expanding, political leaders of both parties were careful to carve out and preserve exceptions to the rights of public employees. To this day, it is not only illegal for federal workers to strike, but, according to the same statute, it is illegal for us to even assert the right to strike. The dubious constitutionality of such a clause aside, it has had its intended effect. Our mere discussion of a federal strike – to say nothing of others’ explicit endorsement of such an action – compels us to author opinions anonymously.
Leaving aside the strike question, one must understand that federal workers are bullied even when it comes to the most elementary political activity. Consider the Hatch Act, which prohibits lobbying or partisan electoral activity on the clock. The act’s reasonable restrictions are designed to guard against graft, but are being weaponized by agency bosses against any political speech. Consider last week’s internal email to FAA employees, which conflates at-work partisan activity with “remarks made in any forum”.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/24/federal-workers-shutdown-organized-labor-movement