08/18/2025
What has unfolded since March was obvious; so was the tragically inadequate response of labor.
In an article for Jacobin this spring, I compared the federal unions’ legal-only strategy with that of 1970 postal workers who, facing the potential loss of their civil service status (and grumbling about low pay), took militant strike action.
Seeing other federal workers demanding similar efforts, President Richard Nixon’s right-hand man H. R. Haldeman feared “radicalization, a national strike, other walkouts, i.e., Teamsters, Air Traffic Controllers [who were about to start a sick-out], etc. to cripple whole country at once.”
In a matter of days, Nixon flip-flopped from making threats against the postal workers to making promises to them.
The Trump administration moved ahead last week with its plans to void the collective bargaining agreements covering hundreds of thousands of federal workers. The labor movement appears largely quiescent in the face of this historic union busting.
