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    US health department offers early retirement in latest round of Musk-led cuts

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    The US health department told employees on Monday they could apply for early retirement over the next 10 days and should respond to a request for information on their accomplishments of the past week, according to emails seen by Reuters.Republican president Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who oversees the so-called “department of government efficiency”, are spearheading an unprecedented effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy, including through job cuts.The Department of Health and Human Services told employees in an email that it received authorization on Monday from the US office of personnel management to offer early retirement under the voluntary early retirement authority, which impacts agencies “that are undergoing substantial restructuring, reshaping, downsizing, transfer of function or reorganization”.An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Employees were directed to the OMP’s website, which says eligible employees must be at least 50 years old with 20 years of federal service, or any age with 25 years of service, among other requirements. The offer is valid until 14 March at 5pm ET, the email said.Last week, the administration sent out a second round of emails asking employees to share five bullet points on their accomplishments of the past week.Employees at HHS, which includes the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), had previously been told that they did not have to respond to Doge’s emails and there would be “no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond”.Multiple other US agencies had also told employees not to respond immediately to Doge’s demand, including the FBI and state department.But in a Monday email seen by Reuters, HHS told employees to respond to Doge’s email by midnight without revealing sensitive information, including the names of drugs and devices they are working on.HHS previously warned employees that responses to Doge’s request may “be read by malign foreign actors”. The department sent two versions of its email on Monday, the second of which removed that reference.The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents HHS workers, told members in an email seen by Reuters that they must comply with the agency’s choice to proceed with the “ill-advised exercise”. The union was not immediately available for comment.Employees were told in HHS’s email to follow supervisor guidance on how to reply and respond in a way that would not identify grants, grantees, contracts or contractors, nor information that would identify the precise nature of scientific experiments, research or reviews.“I feel I will spend the whole day writing these five bullets in a way that does not contain sensitive information while also providing information that my job is important. I don’t know if this can be called efficiency,” said an FDA source who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.Employees on leave, out of office due to work schedules, or who have signed a deferred resignation agreement are not required to respond, according to the email. More

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      Trump administration can continue mass firings of federal workers, judge rules

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      The Trump administration can for now continue its mass firings of federal employees, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, rejecting a bid by a group of labor unions to halt Donald Trump’s dramatic downsizing of the roughly 2.3 million-strong federal workforce.The ruling by the US district judge Christopher Cooper in Washington DC federal court is temporary while the litigation plays out. But it is a win for the Trump administration as it seeks to purge the federal workforce and slash what it deems wasteful and fraudulent government spending.The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) and four other unions sued last week to block the administration from firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and granting buyouts to employees who quit voluntarily.The unions are seeking to block eight agencies including the Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Veterans Affairs from implementing mass layoffs.In his 16-page order, Cooper started by acknowledging Trump’s “onslaught of executive actions that have caused, some say by design, disruption and even chaos in widespread quarters of American society”.He went on to add: “Affected citizens and their advocates have challenged many of these actions on an emergency basis in this Court and others across the country.”However, Cooper on Thursday said, he likely lacks the power to hear the case, and the unions instead must file complaints with a federal labor board that hears disputes between unions and federal agencies.Cooper wrote: “NTEU fails to establish that it is likely to succeed on the merits because this Court likely lacks subject matter jurisdiction over the claims it asserts. The Court will therefore deny the unions’ motion for a temporary restraining order and, for the same reasons, deny their request for a preliminary injunction.”Trump has tapped the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, to lead a so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, which has swept through federal agencies slashing thousands of jobs and dismantling federal programs since Trump became president last month and put Musk in charge of rooting out what he deems wasteful spending as part of Trump’s dramatic overhaul of government. Trump also ordered federal agencies to work closely with Doge to identify federal employees who could be laid off.Termination emails were sent last week to workers across the federal government – mostly recently hired employees still on probation at agencies such as the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the General Services Administration and others.The plaintiffs, which include the United Auto Workers, the NTEU and the National Federation of Federal Employees, said in their lawsuit that White House efforts, including through Doge, to shrink the federal workforce violate separation-of-powers principles by undermining Congress’s authority to fund federal agencies.The unions said that unless the court intervenes, they will be irreparably harmed by lost revenue from dues-paying members who were either fired or retired early to take buyouts.In a statement released last Wednesday, NTEU president Doreen Greenwald said: “We will not stand idly by while this administration takes illegal actions that will harm citizens, federal employees and the economy.”She went on to add: “All of these orders are further evidence that this administration is motivated not by efficiency, but by cruelty and a total disregard for the government services that will be lost.”Most civil service employees can be fired legally only for bad performance or misconduct, and they have a host of due process and appeal rights if they are let go arbitrarily. The probationary employees primarily targeted in last week’s wave have fewer legal protections.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA judge overseeing a similar case in Boston federal court allowed the buyouts to move forward in a ruling on 12 February, finding labor unions that filed the case did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit because they had not shown how they would be harmed by the plan.The window to accept buyouts has now closed, and about 75,000 workers took up the administration’s offer, according to the US office of personnel management. That represents about 3% of the total federal workforce.The unions are asking the judge to declare the firings and buyouts illegal and block the government from firing more employees or offering another round of buyouts.In a Monday court filing, the government said the unions did not have a right to sue because they would not be harmed by the firings and buyouts. Granting the unions’ request would also inappropriately interfere with the president’s efforts to streamline the federal workforce, the government argued.More than 70 lawsuits have been filed seeking to block Trump’s efforts to remake the federal workforce, clamp down on immigration and roll back transgender rights.The results have so far been mixed, but judges have blocked some aspects of Trump’s marquee policies, including his bid to end automatic birthright citizenship to children born in the US.On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the Internal Revenue Service had began firing employees as part of the widespread layoffs.Speaking to the outlet, a person familiar with the decision said that approximately 7,000 employees were expected to lose their jobs, marking 7% of a 100,000-person agency.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Want to defeat Trump? Support unions | Eric Blanc

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      Can anybody stop Trumpism? Progressives are understandably worried. Though federal judges may temporarily pause some of the new administration’s most brazenly illegal executive orders, a hyper-conservative supreme court lies waiting in the wings. And looking ahead to 2028, it’s hard to feel hopeful about defeating Maga given that the Democratic party continues to hemorrhage working-class voters.But there’s no need to despair. A powerful force in our society has the legitimacy, resources and leverage to turn things around: organized labor. Unions can beat back Donald Trump’s attacks, expose his sham populism, and – by uniting workers around their shared economic interests – help isolate his xenophobic scapegoating.Rather than hibernate for the next four years, or limit ourselves to posting online about the president’s latest outrages, each of us can lend support to workers organizing at federal agencies, schools, Starbucks, Amazon, auto plants and beyond. Just as importantly, we can expand the labor movement’s reach by unionizing our own workplaces. It won’t be easy to counter Trump’s shock-and-awe offensive, or to fill the void left by the Democrats’ disarray. But it’s both necessary and possible.Consider Trump’s latest moves. While he can appoint his cronies to head crucial civil service agencies, it is still unionized federal employees who make these institutions run. And their resistance to his power grab – through defying the new administration and enlisting public support – constitutes our best hope for protecting these services upon which millions of Americans depend.Remember the government shutdown during the first Trump administration? By late January 2019, the crisis had already lasted a month, with no end in sight. But then the flight attendant leader Sara Nelson began making national waves by agitating for a general strike, stressing the public safety dangers of not paying the people whose labor makes air travel possible. On 25 January, various air traffic controllers refused to come into work, resulting in a temporary grounding of New York flights. Only a few hours later, Trump announced a deal to end the shutdown.Resisting Maga’s barrage is crucial. But it would be a mistake to fight only on the right’s chosen political terrain. Trump’s achilles heel is that he won by speaking to the economic grievances of working people, but heads an administration of and for billionaires obsessed with maximizing their own profits and control. Centrist Democrats have generally been unable to expose this contradiction, as they too are often tied to big business. But combating corporate greed is the labor movement’s bread and butter, which is why unions in our era of rampant inequality are experiencing record-high levels of popularity, even among conservatives and independents.The administration’s connection to the world’s richest men – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg – makes it easier for anti-Trump sentiment to channel into workplace battles. When Tesla factory workers unionize, or coders at X push back against their boss, this is now de facto a confrontation with the White House. By scaling up high-publicity union drives and strikes for economic dignity across the country, labor and its supporters can force politicians to show which side they’re really on.Even labor struggles focused on economic issues can have dramatic political repercussions. Faced with Trump’s efforts to deprive workers of the right to unionize by kneecapping the National Labor Relations Board, every union drive is now on a collision course with the new regime. Moreover, since workplaces bring together people from a wide range of backgrounds and ideologies, union organizing requires listening to and persuading people who disagree with us, a skill sorely lacking among most progressives today. Effective persuasion happens not by haranguing or shaming others, but rather by finding points of commonality – often economic – around which working people can come together.Through this patient process of building solidarity across differences, labor organizing is uniquely positioned to convince large numbers of Americans to direct their anger at the bosses above (and their political proxies), instead of immigrants or trans people. Unsurprisingly, union members voted for Kamala Harris by a 16-point margin in the last election; indeed, Trump would probably have lost had the US labor movement represented a significantly higher percent of the American workforce.Despite Trump’s constriction of labor rights, conditions overall remain favorable for union growth. Organized labor, for example, is sitting on an unprecedented war chest of roughly $38bn in assets, over a third of which are highly liquid. This is more than enough to defend against Project 2025 while simultaneously going on the offensive against corporate America. Big, assertive unionization battles could lay bare Trump’s oligarchic allegiances, while pressuring Democratic politicians to champion economic populism.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnfortunately, it’s unclear whether union officials will finally find the chutzpah to break from business as usual. Most remain exceedingly risk averse, narrowly focused, and deferential to establishment politicians. For that reason, labor’s post-pandemic upsurge has been driven from below, with young, left-leaning workers taking the lead – most recently at the Whole Foods in Philadelphia that voted for a union last Monday. But to scale up widely enough to transform the US, this grassroots uptick will need deep-pocketed labor leaders to fully jump into the fight.It remains to be seen whether unions can rise to the challenge of Trumpism. For the sake of our democracy, our livelihoods, and our planet, let’s hope they do.What’s giving me hope nowWhat’s giving me hope is that Philadelphia Whole Foods workers last Monday voted to unionize, 130 to 100. It’s a really big deal: this was only the second time American workers have defeated Amazon in a union election. Many in the labor movement were expecting a loss, since Maga is now in office and since management – headed by Trump’s new billionaire buddy Bezos – went scorched earth against the nascent union effort. But a multiracial crew of young, self-organized, left-leaning workers proved the skeptics wrong, as so often has been the case since 2021. Labor passed its first big test under Trump, and hopefully we’ll see many similar wins in the months to come.

      Eric Blanc is the author of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, which is out with UC Press in February 2025 More

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      What does Elon Musk believe?

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      View image in fullscreenElon Musk is not a people person, as millions around the world will be able to attest after the planet’s richest man cut off food supplies, healthcare and probably even life itself to some of the most vulnerable without so much as a fore- or afterthought.Musk sees himself as a data man, wielding numbers like a machete to slash and burn his way through government waste and corruption as he leads the rightwing charge to capture the US state.Within days of Musk dispatching his minions to kick down the doors of the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and rifle through its finances, the agency was in effect out of business. Musk claimed USAid was “a criminal organisation” and full of Marxists – an assertion called “laughable” by the agency’s former administrator under George W Bush, Andrew Natsios, who describes himself as a conservative Republican.Musk didn’t care. Less than three weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the head of the new “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a special group that Trump created, has built an extensive power base in Washington of a kind not seen before.Trump has given free rein to Musk to send his operatives into more than a dozen federal agencies to look for evidence of mismanagement and subversion, and to generally create chaos, outside of the usual bounds of oversight and regulation.Crucially, Musk now in effect controls the office of personnel management (OPM), which oversees federal employment. He immediately encouraged more than 2 million government workers to resign with the stated aim of forcing a few hundred thousand out the door.View image in fullscreenIt’s clear who Musk thinks should be running the country instead, from his recruitment to Doge of “special government employees” from his own companies and the wider tech industry to storm the federal citadels. They include a significant proportion of young male software engineers of the kind who tend to worship tech billionaires like Musk, including a teenager who has gone by “Big Balls” online.Few, if any, have undergone the security clearances other government workers need to access sensitive and personal information. If they had, Doge might have been discouraged from hiring another recruit from Silicon Valley, Marko Elez, who was sent into the US treasury department, where he had access to taxpayer records. Elez resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal revealed he had posted racist messages on social media and defended eugenics.“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Elez wrote on X in July.He was reinstated on Friday.On the face of it, Musk is implementing Trump’s commitment to cut spending, “dismantle the deep state” and sack “rogue bureaucrats”. But his embrace of the far right, including an unrestrained endorsement of the German nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), and what looked to much of the world like a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration celebrations, has raised urgent questions about Musk’s political beliefs and how he intends to use his newfound power.As it happens, much of what Musk is doing is also good for his businesses, including scrapping regulatory bodies and curtailing the power of unions and workers. The labor board, which upholds workers’ rights, has been frozen and agencies that regulated the financial industry have either been scrapped or told to abandon key parts of their work.Musk’s politics have been eclectic. In the past, he has backed universal basic income and a tax on carbon emissions. At the same time, he has a deep dislike of trade unions and public transport because it means being around “random strangers, one of whom might be a serial killer”. He espouses a visceral hostility to diversity programmes and appears to regard those who believe in helping the less fortunate as subversive.Thrown into this mix is Musk’s fascination with the pro-natalism movement, for which he has done his bit by fathering 12 children, and his hope that one day his rocket company, SpaceX, will help them colonise Mars.Raised in South Africa under apartheid, Musk is clearly suspicious of democracy and the leaders it produces. His grandfather headed a fringe political movement in Canada in the 1930s, Technocracy Incorporated, which sought to abolish democracy in favour of government by elite technicians, but its overtones of fascism saw it banned during the second world war.Musk shows some of the same tendencies, as do other libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley billionaires unhappy with the messiness of elected government. He has spoken in support of direct democracy, where policies and other issues are decided by popular referendums rather than elected representatives.In the meantime, Musk appears happy to embrace the US version of the “strongman” ruler through the Republican right’s “unitary executive theory”, which regards the authority of the president as paramount and Congress as an impediment to the implementation of his or her will.Over the years, Musk has described himself as “not a conservative” and “politically moderate”. He backed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election going back to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 until he soured on the party in the past few years.View image in fullscreen“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold,” he wrote on X in 2022.But there were clues to other motives, including a statement that he would be voting Republican because of Joe Biden’s support for trade unions and what he regarded as insufficient Democratic backing for his companies.Not long before last year’s presidential election, Musk declared that Trump would save American democracy from Democrats trampling on individual liberties. But he kept moving ever further to the right in public, with an open embrace of racist European political leaders, including the AfD, and the promotion of claims of a “white genocide” in the country of his birth, South Africa.Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, has linked his shift from Obama voter to cheerleader for the AfD to the transition of his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson.Wilson was 16 when she texted a relative: “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna. Don’t tell my dad.” The day after Wilson turned 18 in 2022, she changed her name because of “gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.Musk told Isaacson he was sanguine about the change but then Wilson became a fervent Marxist and wouldn’t speak to him any more, a situation he described as one of the most painful of his life.“She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Musk told the author.Musk blamed Wilson’s progressive Los Angeles school and said he was disturbed at the “woke mind virus” holding back America.After California passed a law barring school districts from requiring teachers to tell parents of changes to a student’s sexual orientation and gender identity, Musk announced he was moving the headquarters of his two largest companies, SpaceX and X, to Texas. He said that the law caused “massive destruction of parental rights” and put children at risk of “permanent damage”.Musk did not say that moving his companies also had significant tax advantages for himself and his businesses, which would additionally be subject to fewer climate regulations than in California.Still, his apparent anger over his daughter’s transition appears to have set in motion a broader hostility toward identity issues, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, a favourite target of the Trumpian right. Musk announced that the words “cis” and “cisgender” were considered slurs on X, and he came out against pronouns, tweeting that they “suck”.In late 2022, another tweet linked Musk’s hostility toward the way people choose to identify themselves – an odd position for a man who claims to be a champion of free speech – to his anger at the Biden administration’s Covid restrictions.View image in fullscreenMusk mocked Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, who was instrumental in the lockdown and other measures to contain the crisis.“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” he wrote.Some saw the tweet as evidence that Musk was now openly identifying with the far right, which defied mask regulations and stay-at-home orders and called for Fauci to be locked up for intruding on their liberties.But while Musk’s hostility toward pronouns was personal, Covid regulations touched on his businesses and net worth.Musk refused to close his Tesla factory at the height of the pandemic, claiming without evidence that “panic” over the virus would do more damage than the disease itself. He disparaged social distancing, predicted that the virus would claim few lives in the US (it eventually claimed more than 1.2 million), and described the lockdown as “fascist” and “erasing people’s freedoms”. Musk tweeted a meme comparing Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to Hitler over his government’s Covid restrictions.Musk may have dressed up his position as a concern about people’s welfare but its immediate effect was to keep his factories rolling even if the people working in them were at greater risk of infection and death. And while Musk claimed a principled position in favour of individual liberty, he has a history of suppressing the rights of his own workers.In 2023, he said that he disagreed with the concept of trade unions.“I just don’t like anything which creates a lords-and-peasants sort of thing,” he told the New York Times Dealbook Summit. “Unions naturally try to create negativity in a company.”One reason Musk may not like unions is they tend to stand up for their members. He has faced accusations from former employees of aggressively using a secretive dispute-resolution process to fend off repeated claims of sexual and racial harassment within his companies, including accusations of women enduring a “frat house” atmosphere of groping and other abuses ignored and even perpetrated by high-level managers.Tesla has paid out millions of dollars to Black workers subjected to racial harassment.Yet, while Musk restricts the rights of his employees to seek redress from the courts, he and his companies filed at least 23 lawsuits in federal courts in the year to August 2024, according to Fortune magazine.They include a legal action by X against the Center for Countering Digital Hate over a report accusing the social network of making millions of dollars out of accounts spewing hate from “neo-Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists and spreaders of dangerous conspiracy theories”. A California judge threw out the lawsuit last year, saying it was clear the “case is about punishing the defendants for their speech”.Musk will probably spend a lot more time being frustrated by the courts. Judges have already put on hold his push for mass resignations from the civil service and placed some restrictions on Doge’s mass collection of data. Federal workers, unions and civil rights organisations are lining up a flurry of lawsuits to challenge Musk’s actions.But the courts themselves may become a target for Musk as he works to tear down the old order.Isaacson in his biography wrote that Musk once described being in “a state of war at all times” as one of his default settings.No one thinks that, so long as Trump continues to regard the billionaire as more of an asset than a liability, Musk’s thirst for power will stop at gutting federal agencies. The question is where he will launch his next offensive. More

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      Democrats ignored pleas to address price of ‘eggs and gas’, campaigners say

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      Saru Jayaraman tried. As far back as January, the president of low-pay campaign group One Fair Wage recalls telling Democratic leaders in Washington DC that voters were worried about the cost of living.“It just went on deaf ears,” she said. “One of the biggest challenges we faced was they kept wanting to talk about the economy. And we kept saying, it’s not about the economy, it’s about our economy: it’s about my economy, my ability to pay for eggs and gas.”“And so, it was no surprise to us that people did not turn out, why people did not feel incredibly motivated – whether they didn’t vote or they voted for Kamala or they voted for Trump,” said Jayaraman, director of the food labor research center at University of California, Berkeley. “There was a universal feeling of ‘you’re not listening to us.’”A single mom working three jobs as a waitress, and struggling to make ends meet on a sub-minimum tipped wage, is “not going to take time out of her three jobs to vote for either person”, she added. “There’s no future for the party unless they really address the needs of working people. And I use the word ‘address’. It isn’t just running on the issue.”Democrats face calls to actSam Taub has worked as a server for the past 10 years in Michigan, one of the key election swing states, which swung from Joe Biden in 2020 to Donald Trump in 2024. Taub was not that surprised by this year’s result.“You see a lot of generalizations of people who live in the midwest, people who are working class and people who are working-class in the midwest,” he said. “And as somebody who is one of those people, it is a little bit frustrating to hear people say that they’re listening to you – and then not actually listen to you.“The message that Democrats really need to understand is that they can’t assume that they already know what people think and what people need.”View image in fullscreenTaub is one of hundreds of service industry workers who backed an open letter, organized by One Fair Wage in the wake of the 2024 election results, urging the Democratic party to do more to address the needs of working people.Democrats at the state level need to fight to protect workers rights even more given the upcoming second Trump administration, he argued, and push back against industry efforts to scale back or prevent policies, such as raising the sub-minimum wage for servers in Michigan, from taking effect.“It’s pretty obvious Donald Trump is not going to protect workers’ rights, so it’s really important for politicians at the state level to do everything that is within their power to protect workers,” said Taub. “By getting rid of the sub-minimum wage, which is something that’s happening gradually, we can help a lot of people.”Juan Carlos Romero, a bartender in New York City, has worked in the restaurant industry for 16 years. “It’s really hard to try to make ends meet” in this economy, he said.Under Trump workers in the service industry aren’t going to see improvements, he suggested, arguing that the incoming administration’s proposals – such as eliminating taxes on tips – overlook the fundamental issue that so many service workers are in precarious economic circumstances because they rely on tips and sub-minimum hourly wages.Democrats must use the final weeks before Trump takes office “to support us”, he added. “I think our desperation comes from the reality that we see, and especially if wages stay like this, [that] they’re going to continue to affect people on a daily basis. So it really is a call to action that is desperately needed by folks in the industry.”Fears of recessionCampaigners and academics fear the Democratic party’s losses of the White House and Senate majority, and its failure to retake the House majority will leave workers on lower incomes – especially immigrants – vulnerable.“One of the consequences of this election is that the government backs away from having people’s back when they want to join a union,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. “There’s just a cool irony to that that I think is just devastating: this is a time when people need to be in a union more than ever.”Deportation plans targeting undocumented and temporary workers are already inciting fear among these workers. Immigration groups are pushing Biden to solidify protections for immigrants before he leaves office in January.“I think that the anti-immigrant fervor out of Trump and his acolytes is terrifying and defies humanity,” said Judy Conti, director of government affairs at the National Employment Law Project. “And I think immigrant workers everywhere have reason to be worried about discrimination, potential violence, workplace raids.”Trump’s proposed tariffs, and the impact they may have on the costs of basic goods and necessities, are also causing concern.“If they’re not talking about raising wages, which they’re not, but they’re talking about making all of the goods and services that we need for our day-to-day lives 20% more expensive,” warned Conti. “I have fears of recession, and certainly fears that things are going to be less affordable for the people who can’t afford it most.”Democrats who still hold office nationwide are facing calls to help such people when Trump reaches the White House. “Even if you fail,” the One Fair Wage letter said, “at least we’ll see you fighting for once.” More

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      The US needs more working-class political candidates | Dustin Guastella and Bhaskar Sunkara

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      Dan Osborn’s performance this month was a bright spot in an otherwise bleak election cycle for progressives. Although he ultimately lost, the independent US Senate candidate outperformed Kamala Harris in Nebraska by 14 percentage points while running an assertively anti-establishment, pro-union platform. His formula was simple: connect with people about their economic problems, tell them who to blame for them, and tell them what he would do about it.Now he’s starting a new political action committee, Working Class Heroes Fund, to support working-class candidates, something our national politics direly needs.Throughout 2024, Osborn’s ideas shaped what should have been an uneventful race in a deep red state. He ran on a pro-union agenda that would have passed the Pro Act to aid organizing efforts, raised the minimum wage, and provided mandatory bereavement leave for all workers. His statement to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl – “I want to challenge the system because the system has to be challenged” – captured a common campaign theme.Osborn’s egalitarianism was profoundly connected to his personal experiences. “Thirty-thirty 16-hour shifts on Sundays,” he recalled in one of his closing campaign ads. “That’s what I had to do to provide for my family.” His story wasn’t unusual, but it wasn’t one reflected in Washington (a city he hadn’t even visited until April of this year).Osborn led a strike in 2021 at a Kellogg’s plant in Omaha and has spent most of his working life as an industrial mechanic – in fact, he’s already back working as a steamfitter. He made $48,000 last year, within a few thousand of the Nebraska median income. This background was highlighted by the Osborn campaign through the race, contrasting the candidate with a Congress where most members are wealthy: “My opponent, Deb Fischer, is … taking so much corporate cash she should wear [sponsor] patches like Nascar.”Osborn’s working-class identity isn’t just an affect; it’s something that connects him to the needs and aspirations of millions of other American workers. And the profound lack of people like him in Congress is one of the major reasons why working-class people have been treated as a political afterthought. Right now, fewer than 2% of congressmembers come from working-class backgrounds. There is virtually no one in government who speaks for, or speaks like, regular workers.But wait, isn’t advocating for more working-class candidates just another form of identity politics? That is, isn’t this just more of the same thing that hurt Democrats in the first place?It’s true that the emphasis on a person’s race, gender and sexuality as a demonstration of their moral and political rectitude has been an albatross for progressives in recent years. This has been especially true when it’s been presented as tales of personal trailblazing (think #ImWithHer and Hillary Clinton’s crusade to become the first female president) or to trumpet individuals simply because of qualities they were born with rather than the ideas they espouse. However, class is different. And, in the case of Osborn, his class background was key to his being able to deliver a credible populist appeal that challenged the rule of the wealthy.In other words, as a working-class populist, Osborn’s appeal could cut across the various divisions of race, gender, region and religion to unite working people, because to be working class, and to proudly identify as such, is not just to show voters that you “feel their pain”, as Bill Clinton once dramatized, but that you actually understand the world from their position. And that’s one reason Osborn thinks that getting more workers represented in office is such a good idea.We agree. After all, the fight for working-class political representation was part of the origin story of self-conscious workers’ movements everywhere in the world. In the United Kingdom and Australia, the battle to extend the franchise helped give rise to labor parties. In Germany, the Social Democratic party swelled under the leadership of August Bebel, a carpenter and woodturner. In Brazil, the Workers’ party, led by a metalworker with little formal education, rose to become a governing force.Even in the United States, at the height of the New Deal, the Congress of Industrial Organizations organized the first-ever political action committee with the explicit aim of getting workers into Congress.In each case, and there are many others, the simple argument that workers – their organizations, and their interests – deserved representation in government generated immense excitement. And in each case, the parties that pursued such a goal became, at least for a time, the undisputed representatives of working-class interests in government.There are similar political opportunities in the United States today. While Nebraska might have had a particularly effective worker populist, there is evidence that people want to vote for workers across the country. A study by the Center for Working-Class Politics found that among working-class voters, hypothetical candidates with elite or upper-class backgrounds performed significantly worse than candidates from humbler backgrounds.Yet, in reality, there were few working-class candidates to vote for. Only 2.3% of Democratic candidates worked exclusively in blue-collar jobs before entering politics. Even if we broaden out the category to professionals like teachers and nurses, the number is still under 6%. Why? Mainly because it’s extremely expensive to run for office. Most workers simply do not have the fundraising networks or the ability to take time away from their jobs to run for office.What’s more, as Duke University political scientist Nicholas Carnes has shown, the burdens of running for office are much higher for blue-collar workers than they are for those in white-collar professions because they also include the considerable challenges that working-class candidates have in persuading political gatekeepers to endorse their candidacies over much more familiar options in salaried professions who speak the same language and run in the same social circles. Osborn’s new effort to help ease some of these burdens is laudable for this reason.The lack of working-class representation in government is also one major factor in explaining the dysfunction in our politics and the persistence of economic policies that seem to only benefit the rich. Working-class voters have been cut adrift. Their views and voices are invisible in Washington, and they see no real champions for their interests. One reason these voters are likely to prefer working-class candidates is that these candidates are much more likely to advance an economic agenda that benefits them.Osborn’s appeal might not be so unique if we can encourage more working-class candidates to run. Here the labor movement has a role to play in recruiting talented candidates, protecting their day jobs during the campaign, providing training and working with organizations like Osborn’s to get these candidates the funds they need to win elections. It’s not a silver bullet to fixing our broken politics, but it’s a great start.During his campaign, Osborn reminded a crowd that “the Senate is a country club of millionaires that work for billionaires”. It’s high time that the people who created their wealth got a foot in the door.

      Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623

      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      Union calls Democratic party staff layoffs after record fundraising ‘callous’

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      The union representing workers at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has accused the party’s leadership of a “callous” betrayal of party values after the sudden announcement of layoffs of permanent employees without severance.“Despite record-breaking fundraising, the DNC failed to provide any financial support to those who have tirelessly served the Democratic Party and its mission,” said the union in a press release.They compared the lack of severance to laid-off employees with the Harris-Walz campaign, which provided three weeks of severance to laid-off employees. “These cuts go far beyond typical campaign turnover and impact employees who were previously told their positions would be retained after the election,” the union claimed.“I’m heartbroken. These are single parents. These are new parents. These are recent graduates. You can ask any laid-off employees, friend or family, and they will vouch for the toll this job takes on you. You already give up so much when you decide to work for this organization and now they’re taking our financial security as well.” said a former DNC staffer and union member who was one of the workers laid off.They requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from future job prospects. “Losing an election does not absolve the organization of its responsibility to treat workers with basic dignity.”Over 100 staff at the DNC voted to unionize with Service Employees International Union Local 500 in January 2022.Workers were notified at night on 13 November of the layoffs, according to the press release, and the union claimed the DNC had not disclosed to the union the full extent of the layoffs or if additional cuts were planned.The former staffer argued that nothing in the union contract precludes the DNC from providing severance and transparency regarding layoffs.“How could we have raised record-breaking numbers and still find ourselves in this situation?” they added.The press release claimed DNC leadership had not been responsive in the wake of the layoffs and criticized the layoffs in contrast to the staff management whose decisions “created this situation” remain on payroll.“Every cycle, political organizations scale up to meet the demands, and as the cycle comes to a close, it’s a tough reality of our industry that we must part with talented, hardworking staff,” a DNC spokesperson said in a statement to the Guardian “While the DNC has met the terms of the union agreement negotiated by the CBA, we share the entire DNC family’s frustration and continue to provide resources to all members of the team to support them in this transition.”They claimed, per the Warn Act, staffers were notified 60 days in advance of termination, that 95% of staffers laid off were cycle hires. They also claimed that all union contract terms were upheld and that the DNC union and DNC management had been in communication, adding that the current DNC staff were focused on the transition ahead of the new DNC chair election early next year, ongoing fundraising and infrastructure upkeep, and holding Trump’s Republican party accountable. More

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      Kamala Harris will be a president for the labor movement – and for working women | Liz Shuler

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      The 6.6 million union women in this country – nearly half of today’s labor movement – know an ally when we see one. We know we have one in Kamala Harris.As president of the AFL-CIO, representing 60 unions across the United States in every sector of the economy, I’ve crisscrossed the country seeing our union members get out the vote for Harris in this election. So many of us – whether we’re retail workers, caregivers, teachers, nurses, construction workers or in any line of work – see in Vice-President Harris’s story something that mirrors our own.When I joined my union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, in Portland, Oregon, I got used to being the only woman in a room full of mostly men. We organized new members, fought against corporate greed and achieved some hard-won gains at the statehouse, which put me on the path to leadership in the labor movement and to becoming the youngest-ever member of the AFL-CIO executive council.That’s when I crossed paths with Richard Trumka, a true labor legend. In 2009, when he decided to run for president of the AFL-CIO, Rich asked me to join his ticket as secretary-treasurer. Trumka was brilliant, forward-thinking and committed to making way for a new generation of labor leaders. He commanded respect as a Pittsburgh mine worker turned president of the United Mine Workers of America, with labor deep in his bones.Then, in August 2021, I got a phone call that changed everything. Rich had suffered a heart attack on a camping trip. He passed away suddenly – and my world was shaken. At the same time as I grieved the loss of Rich, I had to unexpectedly prepare to then lead the labor movement.One of the first people to reach out was Harris. She expressed her condolences, full of the same empathy and compassion that the whole country has now seen in her campaign. We talked about our common bond as women who had come up in male-dominated fields and what it means to her to be able to fight for working women as vice-president.Three years later, when she found herself in a similar moment that required her to step up, she did so admirably. It wasn’t her plan, but it’s what her love for this country required. Duty called, and Harris answered – and when I spoke to the vice- president again that day, I told her we’d be there for her every step of the way.She will lead an administration that honors with action the countless contributions of working women, just as she has for her entire career. As attorney general in California, she protected the jobs of nurses across the state and won back millions of dollars for women and workers who had been illegally underpaid by greedy companies. As a senator, she stood with fast-food workers by walking the picket line in our fight for a $15 minimum wage, and fought to end “right to work” laws.And for the past three-plus years, the vice-president has been a critical part of this historic pro-worker administration – passing massive legislation to create millions of union jobs and protecting millions of workers’ pensions. And when we elect her as president, Harris has outlined her bold vision to finally give care economy workers the pay and protections they deserve, while also lowering prices for all working families.That’s a stark contrast to the Project 2025 agenda of Donald Trump and JD Vance. They fundamentally disrespect women and devalue what we bring to the table. The men on the Republican ticket call us “childless cat ladies” because name-calling is all they can do in response to the electoral power we wield. They have no plan to support working women and our families – their only aim is to claw back the rights we’ve earned. We know that a second Trump term will bring the destruction of unions and contracts, the end of our rights in the workplace and control over our own bodies. From rolling back women’s economic opportunity to robbing us of reproductive freedom, the Trump–Vance platform would undo a century of progress.Because so much is at stake for women and all workers, I proudly worked with the affiliated union leaders of the AFL-CIO to present a unanimous endorsement from our federation for Harris, just 24 hours after she announced her candidacy.The AFL-CIO includes 60 unions of nearly 13 million workers in every sector of the economy – which also makes us the largest working women’s organization in the country. In these past months, I’ve been traveling the country and talking with them directly. I can assure you: we are ready to meet this moment. Our polling shows union women’s support for Harris – a margin of 32 points over support for Trump – is nearly three times the support of women overall.When you smash through a glass ceiling, you’re bound to suffer some wounds. Donald Trump shows his misogyny every day, but the vice-president dismisses these attacks as what we have all come to expect from him – and her focus is locked on our future. Kamala Harris is in the business of uplifting working women. In contrast, a second Trump term would mean catastrophe for the precious liberties that our foremothers have pried from the hands of men just like him.When working people need Harris’s help, she always answers the call. And working women have her back to make sure she continues to deliver the policies and support we need to create a just and equal society for women across the country.

      Liz Shuler is the president of and first woman to lead the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, representing 60 national and international unions and nearly 13 million workers. Her home union is IBEW, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers More

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      ‘Zombie-like’: the US trade agreement that still haunts Democrats

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      More than 30 years have passed since President Bill Clinton persuaded Congress to ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and yet the trade agreement still infuriates many voters and hangs over Kamala Harris’s – and the Democrats’ – chances in this year’s elections.Zombie-like, Nafta just keeps coming back, decades after many Democrats believe it should have died. At the Republican convention, Donald Trump attacked Nafta, calling it “the worst trade agreement ever”. In speech after speech, Nafta is a topic Trump turns to as he seeks to woo the voters in the pivotal blue-collar communities of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – many of whom remain angry about the job losses it caused.There were early warning signs. “A lot of people were saying Nafta was going to be a disaster economically,” said David Bonior, a former Democratic congressman from Michigan who led the congressional fight to defeat Clinton’s push for Nafta. “I could see it was going to be a disaster politically, too.”Nafta acted like a slow-motion poison for Democrats. After Congress ratified it in 1993, year by year more factories closed and more jobs disappeared as manufacturers moved operations to Mexico to take advantage of that country’s lower wages. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank, estimates that the US lost 682,000 jobs due to Nafta, which largely eliminated tariffs between the US, Mexico and Canada.“It’s a lingering issue in Michigan,” said Ron Bieber, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, the US’s largest federation of unions. “Everyone knows someone here in Michigan who lost their job due to Nafta. The door was cracked open to outsourcing before Nafta, but Nafta threw the door open after it was passed.”JJ Jewell, who works at a Ford axle plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, was born two years before Nafta was ratified. The trade pact has been part of the background of his life, he says. Jewell said he often discussed trade problems with other auto workers, even when they didn’t directly discuss Nafta. “It’s an issue,” he said. “Nafta helped expedite the loss of jobs from our country to a country where wages are cheaper. I have friends, family members, neighbors who lost their jobs as a direct result of Nafta. It still affects things decades later.”While Trump talks tough on trade and protecting factory jobs, Jewell said that Trump, while president, fell badly short in his vows to bring back manufacturing jobs. “It’s empty promises,” he said.Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the country’s main labor federation, agreed, saying that Trump’s tough words on trade have done little for workers. “This is an example of Trump’s rhetoric not matching reality,” Shuler said. “He talks a good game, but there’s no action to back it up. When he had the ability to make a difference, when he was president, he went to different places and pretended to be a savior, and you followed up and you saw that those plants closed and jobs were moved to Mexico. He did nothing to fix it.”Seeing all the lingering discontent about Nafta, many Democrats say it’s unfair for Trump and others to blame their party for the agreement. The idea for Nafta arose under Ronald Reagan, they say, and George HW Bush negotiated the deal, both Republicans. More Republicans in Congress voted to ratify Nafta than Democrats. The vast majority of Senate Republicans also voted for it, while most Democratic senators voted against ratification.Still, Bonior said that Clinton and his administration “get the blame because their top guy was for it”, he said. “Clinton was instrumental in making it happen.”Many workers who lost jobs due to Nafta were able to find other jobs, said Bonior, but their pay was 20% less on average. “Lifestyles were enormously downgraded in my district,” said Bonior, who served as House majority whip. “Clinton bought into Nafta, but a lot of working-class people saw that as a betrayal.”On Nafta, Clinton won strong backing from economists and corporate America. Brushing aside labor’s warnings that Nafta would speed the loss of jobs to Mexico, nearly 300 economists on the right and the left, including several Nobel Prize winners, signed a pro-Nafta letter, saying: “The assertions that Nafta will spur an exodus of US jobs to Mexico are without basis.”Many economists argued that Nafta would increase the number of manufacturing jobs in the US because the nation had a higher-skilled, more productive workforce than Mexico and would thus, in theory, gain factory jobs in an expanded free-trade zone. Pro-Nafta forces also argued that the closer economic integration of the US, Mexico and Canada would create a North American powerhouse to counter China’s fast-growing economic power.Jeff Faux, a former president of the Economic Policy Institute, said many economists failed to realize something important that was happening when Nafta was negotiated: “The US was losing its manufacturing base. It was deindustrializing.”Faux, one of the most outspoken economists against Nafta, said Clinton embraced Nafta because he was eager to present himself as a different type of Democrat and “was trying to ingratiate himself with the business community”. “Clinton saw Nafta as an opportunity to present himself as not just another liberal Democrat,” Faux said. “It was the beginning of the notion that came to dominate the Democratic party that its future is not in working people, that it’s in professionals, in women, in minorities and various ethnic groups. They wanted to put together a new coalition, and labor would be a thing of the past.”Michael Podhorzer, a former AFL-CIO political director, said many blue-collar workers remain angry about Nafta because it was such a departure from President Franklin Roosevelt’s emphatically pro-worker Democratic party. Podhorzer said: “Nafta is the catchall for a series of things that Democrats did that showed they had a greater concern for business interests and a kind of insensitivity to the consequences that accelerating deindustrialization would have on people’s lives.”Trump was shrewd to seize on Nafta, he said: “It’s a way for him to sort of wave a flag, but it doesn’t actually mean he’s on the workers’ side. It channels pretty effectively the frustration that many Americans feel in seeing their jobs go offshore or to Mexico or seeing their communities hollowed out or seeing fewer economics prospects for their kids.”In the view of many labor leaders and workers, the Democrats doubled down on misguided trade policy when Clinton successfully pushed Congress in 2000 to approve normal trade relations with China. That move encouraged many US corporations to outsource operations to lower-wage China, with one study finding that the country lost 2m jobs, including 985,000 factory jobs, because of the normalized trade relations with China. The number of factories in the US also declined by 45,000 from 1997 to 2008, with many workers blaming Nafta and the China trade deal.What’s more, many unions faulted Barack Obama for pushing for another free trade agreement: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a pact with 12 Pacific Rim countries. TPP’s supporters said the deal would increase US exports and build a powerful economic bloc to counter China. TPP was signed in 2016 under Obama’s presidency, but soon after Trump became president, he withdrew the US from TPP, preventing it from taking force.“Obama wasn’t great shakes on trade either,” Bonior said. “A lot of working people said they had enough. They decided we’re not going to be with the Democrats any more, and Trump came along and filled the void. That was very smart for Trump to do.”In a 2016 campaign appearance in Pittsburgh, Trump made a major speech on trade that denounced Nafta and cited several Economic Policy Institute studies that criticized the trade pact. Lawrence Mishel, who was the institute’s president at the time, said: “Trump never really explained what he would do about Nafta or trade. He ended his speech with a call for deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, which was far more pro-Chamber of Commerce than pro-worker.”While Joe Biden voted to ratify Nafta when he was a senator, labor leaders say the president’s current pro-worker stance on trade shows that he recognizes his Nafta vote was a mistake. For Bonior, it might be too little too late.“Biden has been very good on working-class issues. Biden is trying to make up for his vote on Nafta,” Bonior said. “But a lot of working-class people are turned off so much to the Democrats that they’re not hearing of the things Biden and Harris have done for them. They’re not listening. They’re gone. I don’t know if we’ll ever get them back.“They’re to some degree mesmerized by Trump even though Trump has never been for working people,” Bonior continued. “Those plants he said he would restore – he never did any of that.”Many union leaders slam Trump for a speech he gave in Youngstown in which he told thousands of workers that he would bring back all the factory jobs that Ohio had lost. “They’re all coming back,” he said. They didn’t. And when General Motors closed its huge assembly plant in nearby Lordstown, Ohio, in 2019, Trump did little to stop the plant closing or bring back the lost jobs.“He said all those jobs would be coming back, and then he did nothing,” said Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW). “The auto industry abandoned Lordstown, and Trump did nothing.”When Trump was running for president in 2016, he vowed to renegotiate Nafta, and he followed through, reaching a new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2018. Labor leaders had attacked Nafta not only for encouraging companies to move factory jobs to Mexico and but also for failing to effectively protect Mexican workers whose employers had violated their right to unionize or other rights.Union leaders agree that USMCA created a stronger mechanism to crack down on labor violations by Mexican companies, although the Trump administration negotiated that improved enforcement mechanism only after the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and House Democrats demanded that Trump go further in the negotiations. But under USMCA, often called “Nafta 2.0”, US companies have continued moving manufacturing operations to Mexico.Even though USMCA made only minor changes to Nafta, Trump called it, “the best trade deal ever made”. For her part, Harris was one of 10 senators to vote against USMCA, saying it didn’t improve Nafta sufficiently.Faux said many workers applaud Trump on trade because “he did something” about it by renegotiating Nafta, while “the Democrats did nothing”.Labor leaders have differing views of USMCA. David McCall, president of the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers, said: “I think Nafta 2.0 was helpful. It’s gotten some better labor protections.”But the UAW’s Fain was merciless in attacking USMCA. “I like to call it Trump’s Nafta,” Fain said. “Trump’s Nafta only made problems worse. Trump’s Nafta only gave the billionaires more profits. Trump’s Nafta only killed more American jobs. Trump’s Nafta only shipped more work to Mexico.”Both Harris and Trump say they will renegotiate USMCA if elected. Trump also says he will protect factory jobs by imposing a 20% tariff on all imports, but the Steelworkers’ McCall says that’s a terrible idea. “I don’t think the solution to the problem is to have tariffs for the sake of having tariffs,” McCall said. “That’s protection. I think trade is a good thing. It’s an economic stimulator.” He said the US should use tariffs not in a blunderbuss way, but to “punish cheaters or countries that dump their various products”.McCall said the Biden-Harris administration had had a far better strategy for protecting factory jobs. “It’s the first time in generations that we’ve had an industrial policy in this country,” he said, praising three important laws passed under Biden: the infrastructure law, the green energy law and the Chips Act to encourage semiconductor production. McCall said those laws, along with Biden’s targeted tariffs “against countries that cheat”, give the US “an opportunity to be the most productive producers of many products”.While many blue-collar workers like Trump’s views on trade, McCall said: “He’s not a friend of unions or labor. For Trump it’s all about him, not about the person that’s working on the job: the steelworker, the electrical worker, the teamster or the UAW member.” More