Kevin Crane spoke to Colin, a trade unionist from Chicago, in his capacity as an activist, about how American public-sector workers are fighting back against the Trump administration

Can you give us some of your background and tell us and your organisation?

I am a geologist employed via United States Army as part of the civilian Corps of Engineers. I’m the president of Local 777 of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers (IFPTE) and also co-founder and member of the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), which is a cross-union group that came together primarily to confront unjust decisions by the Federal Labor Relations Authority under the first Trump administration, and then to try to demand the implementation of improvements that were promised but not delivered when Biden came in. 

During his term, he nominated a new member of the three-person board, which should have improved the decisions it made, but the Senate did not hold the vote necessary to seat his nominee to the board, meaning the Trump-appointed majority continued for an extra two years instituting anti-worker outcomes. The board was making rulings without regard to employment law and taking away key rights. The federal sector already has limited scope for bargaining, but Trump was reducing even that. A big example was working from home: who qualified for it, and on which days they were allowed to do it. The Trump board ruled that this was excessive interference with management decision-making. The unions responded by bringing a legal case, which they won in court … but the board never implemented the revised decision, so our rights to bargain over issues like that were never actively restored.

Now, the return of Trump sees him demanding that working from home be stopped entirely and they are using the decision from his previous term in office – despite it having been ruled unlawful – as their justification.

How else are things getting worse under the new government?

Job cuts have already hit: they began with removing probationary staff who don’t have full job protection because they haven’t held the roles for long enough. The unions are taking up legal challenges, which is a huge task because of the numbers of people who’ve been hit. Some of these challenges are successful at lower levels, so some workers get to go back to work. But because the attacks come right from the top, the government re-challenges those reinstatements in higher courts, which means that some people have to go through being sacked again. Some people have been suffering this multiple times over!

Trump has directly pronounced that federal employees are to have our bargaining agreements – which were lawful and in effect – completely taken away, and that we have no right to challenge. All lot of our people were already very burned out and frustrated, before any of this began. Government budgets have been cut severely for more than a decade. Our benefits and pay have been severely chipped away, so while we’ve not been getting pay increases, our pension contributions, for instance, have been getting much higher.

It’s heartbreaking because we are public servants, and we approach our work with a sense of duty and community. We’ve spent whole careers trying to help people, but for a long time now we’ve been mistreated for that by the government.

So, tell us about your organising response

We are making real progress. My union only represents about 300 people in our collective bargaining, but we are in a state with ‘right-to-work’ open-shop rules where unions represent staff regardless of whether or not they actually pay for membership. That means that historically not that many people would bother to join. We’ve now been recruiting very effectively and got over 50% union density. This is being achieved in many other parts of the federal workforce.

Federal workers do not have the legal right to strike in America. This part of the public-sector unions has historically been very much on the service-union model – hence a lot of the unions spend a lot of resources on legal actions – but we in FUN are pivoting to worker power on the shop floor and taking direct action. In my workplace, we got direct participation in a petition – for the first time in my memory – rather than just sending a representative. It’s work like this that’s getting people to join.

The government has resorted to some very crude anti-union measures. Trump just issued an executive order that stops trade-union dues payments from being taken off people’s pay cheques to just stop the money coming. The national unions are primarily focused on legal battles, even as the government just breaks law and tries to cut off their funding, and I believe that beyond lawsuits, we are going to need to get organised at the workplace to fight back.

Beyond public-sector workers like yourself, how do you think American workers are feeling?

I believe that working-class opinion is playing out on multiple levels. Private-sector workers who are very aware of these issues see what’s happening, and they know it’s what’s coming for them soon. But more widely, I think that there’s a huge class subjugation at the moment. People have been really suffering under high inflation and low wages, so a lot of workers are just focused on short-term survival, and it’s redirected everyone’s attention. It’s like people are under siege or attack. That’s why something like the ‘price of eggs’ became a big talking point at the election.

There is a housing crisis out here, not because of a shortage of actual homes, but because property companies have bought all the housing and are deliberately pushing up rents. Everything in the system is tied to peoples’ employment – like healthcare for example – and it’s an intentional way to force people to desperately keep the jobs they have as a sole focus above all else.

It’s also widely believed by a lot of people that if the economy ‘improves’, they’ll get benefit out of that. The Democrats lost that election because they were telling the American working class that the economy was already good: but the way that Democrats determine what a good economy is just isn’t one that corresponds to an economy in which workers feel that they’re benefitting.

Our focus is to try to raise the visibility of the working class and the understanding between workers that we need to rely on each other. We can’t just rely on the politicians or the union leaders anymore.

Lastly, what’s your feeling about the anti-government protests that have happening across America?

The protest movement seems to me to be absolutely genuine in its motivations, and it’s been really successful in getting people out. The demo here in Chicago had 30,000 people on it, which is huge. From my perspective, though, the movement hasn’t yet coalesced around a solution.

The demonstrations feel very generalised because people feel that the government has disrupted so much in their lives, and sometimes it just feels a bit incoherent. I see protest movements in countries like France, where the people seem much more organised, and I really feel like we’re just not quite there.

There’s still too much of a belief among a lot of Americans that it’s enough to just pay dues to an organisation and trust it to fight on your behalf. What I think these demonstrations show is that we can get ordinary people to participate in person and fight for each other. As a movement, we need to call each other into community.