Related Articles
On Sunday, the US Postal Service Workers Rank-and-File Committee, an affiliate of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, held a well attended online meeting aimed at organizing mass action by the working class to defend the US Postal Service and oppose the mass firing of federal workers and gutting of essential services by President Donald Trump and his fascistic partner in crime, billionaire Elon Musk.
Over 150 people from around the world, including postal workers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, participated in Sunday’s discussion. Participants discussed and adopted a resolution titled “Oppose the Mass Firing of Federal Workers and Defend Postal Jobs!” The resolution was overwhelmingly supported, with 99 percent of attendees voting in favor.
In his report opening the meeting, Tom Hall, a writer for the World Socialist Web Site, observed that what is “at stake is the future not only of USPS and its 600,000 workers, the jobs of 2 million federal workers and tens of millions who rely on social programs and public infrastructure provided by the federal government, but the democratic and social rights of every worker in the United States and across the world.
“If Trump’s conspiracy is to be defeated, and it can be, it must come through mass independent action from below by the working class.”
Hall observed that Trump and Musk’s apparent power “stems from the totally worthless official opposition from the Democratic Party, which will not even clearly explain to the public what is happening let alone lift a finger to oppose it.
“The Democratic Party,” he said, “is the other main Wall Street party. That is why it is more afraid of opposition from below than it is of fascism in the United States.”
Hall and several other workers commented on the role of the trade unions in suppressing resistance to the ongoing purges. Hall said,
The AFL-CIO says all workers can do is send in testimonials about how Trump has personally affected them. The American Federation of Government Employees, the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, the American Postal Workers Union, and others are calling on their members to write their Congress people. This is something like urging workers in 1933 Germany to write their members of the Reichstag in response to Hitler being named Chancellor.
“Others such as the Teamsters and the International Longshoremen’s Association,” Hall said, “are openly supporting Trump. Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien even defends Trump’s mass firing of federal employees. Their only concern is that their bread continues to be buttered under the new regime no matter what happens to workers.”
Hall warned:
If the so-called normal process established under federal labor law, which bans federal employees from striking, is allowed to play out, this will be the last round of contracts with USPS as a public entity. They say workers must accept laws banning strikes, but this government is totally illegal. Unless Trump is removed by the working class, there will be no rights left for anyone when he is done, and the law such as it is will consist of decrees by the Führer Trump and his Vice Führer Elon Musk. The critical issue of today is the building of a mass independent movement of the working class
After Hall’s opening report an informative and serious discussion followed. Dan, a federal worker, explained that Trump’s executive orders call for “large-scale reduction in force” that will gut entire agencies.
At agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, it would be 90 percent of the workforce. The Education Department, 88 percent. Department of Commerce, 84 percent. Department of Labor, 73 percent. National Park Service, 68 percent.
Dan noted, “The Democrats are doing absolutely nothing to resist the Trump administrations’ dictatorial moves. They are really afraid of encouraging a movement from below.”
A postal worker commented on the conspiracy between the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) bureaucracy and the Trump administration against postal workers.
NALC President Brian Renfroe, he had a big conference call. And one of the things that he kept going on and on about is how we as postal workers can’t strike. And he just really kept reiterating that.
You can tell just how kind of cozy he is with management and it’s like sometimes you can’t see the difference between him and management. It’s just like the lines get so blurred…We need to be confronting management, you know, and the administration about what’s going on and not just acting like we’re helpless.
A postal worker on the West Coast said he thinks there are “a lot of postal workers that are waking up to the reality, and I think we’re starting to flex our muscles. So I think people are realizing that this union isn’t really for our best interest, and that there’s better ways of organizing
“We definitely have the numbers, he said, “We just need to be activated.”
David, a member of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee in the United Kingdom reported on the results of privatizing the postal service in Britain. He said the “shift in online retailing, which increased at breakneck speed particularly during the pandemic, has transformed the postal sector into a cash cow for billionaires’ investors. In Britain, the government-run postal service was privatized in 2013. Since then, £2 billion was looted from the company by major shareholders like BlackRock. Royal Mail is now being taken over by another billionaire, Daniel Kretinsky, for 3.5 billion.”
The opposition to the billionaires plundering of society, David said, was “the huge social power of postal and logistical workers worldwide. Five million workers are employed in the postal carrier workforce globally. Another six million are employed in the parcel courier industry, and that doesn’t include Amazon, which employs more than a million. I was just looking up the figures in North America. By 2034, the North American postal service market alone will be worth an estimated $92.27 billion and globally about $287 billion. We are a workforce with huge potential power. Without us, the global distribution of mail and goods will grind to a halt.”
A postal worker from the Midwest agreed with David, “Last week I delivered over 200 medications to people from the VA and CVS and wherever. And will they get those blood pressure meds on time if Amazon takes over the Postal Service? And I just don’t believe they will.”
That same worker said, “We deserve enough to live on. And when we get enough to live on, everyone in our communities gets enough to live on as well…. We’re not against each other, we are with each other. We are for each other and we raise each other up.”
A major theme of the meeting was that Trump’s attack on immigrants was, in fact, part of an attack on the whole working class. Tom Carter, a writer for the WSWS and lawyer in California pointed out that Trump’s executive orders targeting “alien enemies” are “a direct echo of Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese internment during the Second World War. From a legal standpoint, in fact, his orders are functionally almost identical.”
He highlighted that Trump’s attacks on birthright citizenship “is not just for immigrants, it’s for everybody.
Unless you were born in another country and then became a citizen, in which you are a naturalized citizen, you have birthright citizenship. If they take that away that means that your citizenship is no longer automatically based on birth.
It would no longer be a guaranteed right that you have. It becomes a privilege, and a privilege can be cast in doubt. It can be challenged. It can be taken away. It can be made contingent on loyalty, on allegiance. And of course, if your citizenship can be taken away, then there’s nothing legally stopping you from being shackled and disappeared to Guantanamo in the middle of the night with no trial, no rights, no defense, nobody finds out about it.
So it’s critical that the emerging working class movement against Trump rejects the efforts to divide us, rejects the lies about immigrants, rejects the attempts to stir up prejudice and hate, rejects the efforts to turn brother and sister against brother and sister. That’s the dictator’s playbook. We’ve seen it all before. The working class stands united in opposition to all the attacks on immigrants, an injury to one is an injury to all. It’s all connected.
And we say, no, Trump, we won’t allow you to weaken our collective rights, to divide us. We won’t let you build concentration camps. We know where that leads.
Jerry White, Labor Editor for the World Socialist Web Site, noted the enormous opposition in the working class to Trump and Musks’ firings and attacks on democratic rights, but that this opposition must be “mobilized through the expansion of the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.”
White reviewed the experience of the 1981 PATCO strike and Reagan firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers. He said there was widespread support in the working class for a general strike against Reagan, including a march of half a million workers in September 1981 in Washington, DC. “But the AFL-CIO was opposed to such a fight because the union bureaucracy agreed with the drive to drastically reduce wages in the US so American capitalism could compete with Japan and its other international rivals.”
White introduced and read the resolution titled “Oppose the Mass Firing of Federal Workers and Defend Postal Jobs!” It calls for “the mass mobilization of federal employees, including mass meetings, demonstrations and collective strike action” in opposition to the purging of “federal workers by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).”
The resolution declared that the “destruction of federal jobs is part of a broader corporate drive to gut public services and strip workers of all protections, including the assault on postal workers and the plans for privatization of the postal service.”
The resolution noted that if these firings proceed, “it will mean the elimination of social programs and mass job losses across the public sector. This will encourage state and local officials and private employers to escalate their attack on jobs and rights of workers.”
The resolution continued:
This meeting condemns the cowardice and complicity of the trade union bureaucracy, which has proposed no action to oppose this historic assault on the working class. The AFL-CIO has limited itself to appeals to the media and the Democrats. AFGE merely promises to challenge ‘unlawful terminations.’ This is not a legal issue—it is a political war on the working class. If the union leadership will not fight this, they will fight nothing.
The time for empty statements is over. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees and Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee call for immediate preparations for mass resistance, up to and including strike action. Postal workers must join with federal workers, logistics workers, and all workers to stop this purge. We reject the dismantling of public services and demand workers’ control over critical sectors like the USPS. The only way forward is through the independent organization of the working class, in opposition to both corporate-backed parties and their enforcers in the trade union apparatus.
Source link
