WASHINGTON—Taking the fight against the GOP Trump regime’s war on workers from Congress and the courts but also to the streets, the AFL-CIO’s new Department of People Who Work For A Living—a title satirizing Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”—plans a week of actions nationwide from March 17-23.
The events will include town halls, mass mobilization to descend on congressional offices–especially those of its ruling Republicans–a “Democracy Board,” where people can share stories of the personal impact of the Musk-Trump carnage, and flooding Capitol Hill with calls and e-mails. Details are at www.mobilize.us/aflcio and at https://departmentofpeoplewhowork.org.
The boycotts, protests, and plans to pressure Congress from the streets were all unveiled in a special mass zoom call on March 10 by Our Revolution, the organization of Bernie Sanders campaigners from his 2016 and 2020 presidential drives, to discuss Donald Trump’s “War On Workers.”
“Trump believes he has absolute power, regardless of their protections” under the law, the Constitution or judicial robes, said Julie Su, Labor Secretary in the prior Democratic Biden administration.
The campaigns aim to stop Musk, Trump and the criminal corporate class in its tracks, reversing their carnage, abuses and exploitation. Campaign authors also aim to remind people to celebrate and preserve the pro-worker wins under Biden.
Former National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo detailed those victories on the March 10 zoom call. They’re many and they’ll stay on the books “well into the future,” as law now that the board has a 2-1 Democratic majority. The board has two vacancies Trump could fill.
In essence, the campaign in the streets will be against the chaos and depredation unleashed by Republican president-in-name Donald Trump and his puppeteer president-in-fact Elon Musk. It’s also against the criminal corporate class, whose exploitative moguls are targets, too.
A big symbol of that depredation came the morning of March 10, when Trump pre-emptively ended the collective bargaining agreement between the Government Employees (AFGE) and the Transportation Security Administration, covering 45,000 workers, the airport screeners.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who was also on the zoom call, quoted one screener, at her home New Haven airport, saying: “I’ve been here 25 years. I’m out of a job. They cancelled my union contract. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Added DeLauro: “They’re trying to close the Department of Education. The Department of Labor is next.” Her solution: Inundate Congress. “Congress responds to external pressure, and you are that.”
The pressure has already begun.
- February 28 saw a mass boycott of major right-wing retailers who violate civil rights, trample on workers’ rights and reduce them to serfdom, and who eagerly kowtow to Trump’s white nationalist dictates and Musk’s chainsaw approach to federal workers and services. The boycott produced significant drops in their revenues, and its organizers promise future longer actions.
- Every weekend, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., 83, has been touring the country, as he did when he ran for president. But now he’s addressing thousands of people, rousing them to battle against Trump and Musk and their jihad against workers.
- On March 10, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., followed Sanders to the stump, drawing a crowd of 3,000 people in deep-blue Austin, the capital of deep-red Texas.
- On March 20, the Postal Workers will stage a national protest against the Musk-Trump plan to disassemble and privatize the Postal Service. Wall Street then would sharply raise postage rates.
Puts out “investor guidance”
“On February 27, Wells Fargo put out ‘investor guidance,’ crowing about the privatization of the Postal Service,” Postal Workers President Mark Dimondstein told the town hall meeting participants. Postal privatization “will give them”—the financiers—”the opportunity to increase parcel postage rates between 40% and 130%,” Dimondstein quoted the Wall Street financial behemoth as saying.
Musk and Trump will disassemble the USPS, eliminate its rural routes, fire its board, end its independence, sell off the rest, fire thousands of its 640,000 workers–who are 90%+ unionized–and fold it into the Commerce Department. A secretive billionaire hedge fund CEO is Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Dimondstein noted.
But as workers and their allies take to the streets, the e-mails and the phone lines, they should also remember what they won, and campaign to preserve it. Achievements, which Abruzzo listed, include:
- A crackdown on bosses’ exploitative “independent contractor” dodge, misclassifying workers so they don’t have to pay them minimum wages and overtime, pay Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes and pay for jobless benefits and workers comp. Independent contractors also are legally barred from unionizing.
- Institutionalizing voluntary recognition of unions, also known as card-check.
- Outlawing bosses’ captive audience meetings and non-disclosure agreements. The meetings chill union organizing. The NDAs chill worker mobility.
- Banning unilateral changes in working conditions during bargaining for a first contract or in the interim periods between when one contract ends and another is ratified.
- Full compensation—including paying for medical bills, credit card charges, mortgage payments and more—for a worker whom a boss illegally fires and must later reinstate.
“All are on the books now and will remain there well into the future,” Abruzzo said, since the NLRB is now 2-1 Democratic-vs-Republican members.
The Biden administration’s Labor Secretary, Julie Su, added exploitative employers also want “more 23-year-olds working the night shift at a meat plant” rather than going to school, forcing workers to “put in 50 hours a week” on the job “and then being denied payment for it,” and “denying workers’ comp to construction workers who fall” because their bosses don’t provide protective harnesses and scaffolding.
Trump, Musk and their backers believe “workers are expendable.”
“Luckily, there’s something called the Constitution,” added Abruzzo. “We got rid of a king 250 years ago.”
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