On Friday, the Trump administration made the largest union busting move in American history when it eliminated the collective bargaining rights for tens of thousands of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers who are responsible for screening the close to three million passengers who fly in the U.S. everyday.
In a press release put out by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, previously most famous for executing her 14-month old dog Cricket, the agency said, “eliminating collective bargaining removes bureaucratic hurdles that will strengthen workforce agility, enhance productivity and resiliency, while also jumpstarting innovation.”
Taken with Elon Musk’s push to summarily fire hundreds of thousands of federal civil servants without due process and close congressionally created agencies like USAID, this latest DHS illegal action represents an escalation in the Trump/Musk junta’s authoritarian consolidation of power. There can be NO power held by any collective interest that might in any way limit the power of the unitary executive. And it’s not just the unions formed by working people via collective action that Trump/Musk are targeting. Consider Trump’s latest executive orders targeting law firms with sanctions who have represented Trump’s opponents.
“I hope we learned the lesson of PATCO. It was entirely within our ability to rush to the side of air traffic controllers and imagine if we had done that in 1981 and what a different world we would have today."
Dr. Everett Kelley is the president of the American Federation of Government Employees that represents close to 800,000 federal workers in dozens of essential job titles from the Bureau of Prisons to the Veterans Affairs Administration that cares for millions of our veterans.
“Today, Secretary Noem and the Trump administration have violated these patriotic Americans’ right to join a union in an unprovoked attack,” Kelley said in a statement. “47,000 Transportation Security Officers show up at over 400 airports across the country every single day to make sure our skies are safe for air travel. Many of them are veterans who went from serving their country in the armed forces to wearing a second uniform protecting the homeland and ensuring another terrorist attack like Sept. 11 never happens again.
Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, representing 55,000 Flight Attendants at 20 airlines, told Salon in an interview on Saturday that Noem’s unilateral move was “PATCO on steroids,” referencing President Reagan’s mass firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers.
The union president suggested that the ongoing assault by the Trump/Musk Junta on the unionized federal civil service should prompt a national general strike.
The PATCO move by Reagan, himself a former union president, kneecapped the American labor movement for a generation with union density dropping from twenty percent to ten percent. It had been as high as 35 percent in the 1950s. Not surprisingly, and we can say by design, American worker wages and benefits like pensions all flatlined as wealth concentration and inequality soared beyond what was seen during America’s Gilded Age.
At the same time, Nelson warns Noem’s union busting puts the nation’s air travel security at risk while increasing the likelihood of even longer lines for passengers as TSA returns to the high turnover rate it saw before the onset of collective bargaining and higher wages stabilized this essential workforce.
“First and foremost this is sending a message to the rest of corporate America that contracts don’t matter—-that you can just rip them up. This is going to have reverberations that everyone feels,” Nelson told Salon. “Canceling the collective bargaining agreements is an attempt to get us all to work for less and to make all of us desperate while also trying to break the federal government everywhere in order to privatize everything to put more and more in the hands of a few like Elon Musk….It’s all about authoritarian control and nothing less.”
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Nelson continued. “Fundamentally, let’s recall what the TSA does and where it comes from. I am a Boston based flight attendant and I lost my dear friends on 9/11 on Flight 175. The security screening on that day was private security screening that went to the lowest bidder,” Nelson said. “When we formed the TSA and federalized the workforce that not only connected the TSA to all the other intelligence agencies to have the proper intelligence to be able to look for the real threats and be able to mitigate for that and that was really important.”
“My security improved once the TSA was formed,” Nelson said. “When we fought for AFGE to be able to get the bargaining rights of TSA’s transportation security officers my security improved again because you had a union and if people saw something that wasn’t right they could raise their hands and be clear and these issues would be taken seriously without fear of retaliation for doing so.”
Nelson said she’s excited by the response she’s getting from fellow labor leaders about standing up to the Trump and Musk attack on the federal civil service unions.
“I hope we learned the lesson of PATCO. It was entirely within our ability to rush to the side of air traffic controllers and imagine if we had done that in 1981 and what a different world we would have today. But this is even bigger than that and people are recognizing that,” Nelson said. “What we have to understand is that the people in charge, the people who are doing this are doing this to make the federal workforce miserable, to make all of us miserable and demoralized and shrink into our own space to inspire scarcity and competition among workers so that we don’t rise up together and stop them.”
Nelson continued. “This is the very purpose. This is not the normal consideration of how you run a successful workplace—it’s the very opposite of what the intention is here. Once you understand that then it becomes much easier to understand why we have very few options but to join together and organize a general strike to put a stop to all of it.
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