Federal Unionists Say It’s Not Game Over, It’s Game On

Federal unions are leading the charge to push back against Trump’s anti-worker policies.

By Jenny Brown, Labor Notes

A scrappy network of federal unionists is leading the response to the Trump administration’s attacks on their workplaces, including Trump’s March 27 order purporting to end union contracts covering most federal workers.

Where the Federal Unionists Network has led, union leaders have followed. In a Zoom event that drew 65,000 viewers, FUN got official support from all the significant federal unions for their bottom-up organizing approach to the Trump onslaught.

Federal worker unions are in the crosshairs because they are defending the jobs and agencies that Trump and Elon Musk have been trying to eliminate by illegally bypassing Congress and violating laws governing federal employment.

In February, FUN spearheaded a national “Save Our Services” day of action. Now it has created a rapid-response network, and is developing organizer trainings. It’s also sketching out a strategy to mobilize pressure against the Trump administration’s attacks by alerting the public about all the safeguards and services that are at risk.

“If we can connect those dots and make it clear it’s about defending VA health care, it’s about defending Social Security, it’s about defending all the things that federal workers do, and that we’re going to stand with them, the broader public, we can raise the political cost” of Trump’s attacks, said, said Chris Dols, a FUN founder and president of Federation of Technical and Professional Employees Local 98 at the Army Corps of Engineers.

But the key, FUN members argue, is building cohesion and fighting capacity within federal workplaces themselves.

On a recent FUN call Paul Osadebe, a member of American Federation of Government Employees Local 476 at Housing and Urban Development, urged workers to talk with their colleagues: “Just have a conversation and say, ‘Hey, the stakes are so high right now, but when we act collectively and not separately, and when we are not ruled by fear like they want us to be, we can build the power to stop all of this.’”