Hands off our unions
By Fabrizio Sasso
Executive Director, Sacramento CLC
By the time you read this, President Donald Trump will likely have done ten new things this week to harm American workers and American families—on top of the turmoil he’s created already.
In under 100 days, he’s thrown executive order after executive order at us, dismantling government from every angle and demolishing civil rights in real time. It has, by design, become hard to track all the damage being done by this MAGA administration, which seems intent on tearing down the country as we know it.
A few days ago, hundreds of thousands of people across the country took to the streets in protest, furious with the damage Trump is causing: firing thousands of federal workers; shuttering entire government operations that protect us against everything from disease outbreaks to terrorism; gutting the Social Security administration and potentially putting critical benefits at risk for Medicare and Medicaid recipients; attacking immigrants, both documented and those without papers; attacking transgender people; removing websites and books that tell the history of women, Black America and other non-white groups; and gutting environmental regulations and opening our national forests to logging, just to name a few.
While the “Hands Off” protests are an important and powerful pushback against the Trump agenda, unions and the Labor Movement have been organizing and fighting since day one of this administration. Labor is one of the few powers with the numbers, the knowledge and the economic might to fight back against this authoritarian onslaught, and you can be sure that we are doing it.
Don’t for a minute think that the president isn’t aware of the power of unions. He’s attacking Labor directly in a vicious bid to curb our strength and our will. A few weeks ago, one of those executive orders was aimed at the heart of federal union members. Trump declared employees of about two dozen federal workplaces as being integral to “national security missions.” That’s a roundabout way of trying to break their unions, especially the American Federation of Government Employees. AFGE is the largest federal union, which represents more than 800,000 workers, many veterans. It includes many here in Sacramento, who rallied at the federal courthouse in protest of this blatant attempt to end collective bargaining rights.
But our fight as unionists goes beyond the streets. AFGE, along with other unions, has filed a lawsuit against Trump’s union busting in Oakland federal court for this attack on federal workers.
A few weeks before that California lawsuit was filed, AFGE also sued in federal court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle on behalf of its Transportation Security Officer members, about 47,000 of whom had their contract unlawfully and unilaterally terminated by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—another attempt to strip us of bargaining rights and weaken the power of unions overall.
As we move forward in this chaotic and dangerous time, you can be certain of two things. First, Trump’s attacks on the Labor Movement are going to continue. Second, we will fight.
Here at the Sacramento Central Labor Council, we are ready and willing to do the difficult work of stopping this administration from harming working families. We know that Social Security is a system we have paid into, and a safety net that our elders depend on. We see that Medicare and Medicaid aren’t just health insurance, but programs that save our government money by providing care when it’s needed, not only when it’s an emergency. We understand that protecting our environment protects our future, and that civil rights are non-negotiable for all of us, not just some of us.
In Sacramento, and in the Labor Movement, our values don’t just define us, they bind us together. Now more than ever, unions are critical to protecting our country.
We are ready for that challenge, and we won’t back down.