SAN FRANCISCO—A federal judge in San Francisco halted President Donald Trump’s arbitrary firings—without pay—of some 4,000 federal workers since the Trump-backed partial federal shutdown began on October 1. But Judge Susan Illston couldn’t give them back pay, too.
After a one-day hearing on a suit by the Government Employees (AFGE), AFSCME, the Teachers, and other unions against the firings—called Reductions in Force (RIFs)—U.S. District Judge Susan Illston termed the RIFs “arbitrary, capricious” and “intended for the purpose of political retribution” against the workers and their unions. Judge Illston issued a temporary injunction against the past and future RIFs.
Unfortunately for hard-pressed workers, though, Judge Illston couldn’t order the Trump regime to pay the workers. The judge could only halt the RIFs and ban further ones.
Nevertheless, AFGE President Everett Kelley, AFSCME President Lee Saunders, and other union leaders hailed her ruling. It’s yet another defeat in federal trial courts of Trump’s attack on federal workers, forcing them to work without pay, without protection of union contracts, and for hundreds of thousands of them, not to work at all.
The workers didn’t, and couldn’t, totally win. Judge Illston voided the pink slip RIFs without cause that Trump and his worker-hating Office of Management and Budget chief, Russell Vought, distributed since the partial shutdown began on October 1. The judge also banned the duo from riffing with more workers, as they had planned.
But the already riffed workers won’t get back pay. Neither will “essential” colleagues, such as Transportation Security Officers and air traffic controllers. All will go unpaid as long as the closure continues. Trump and Vought plan to ensure all workers, riffed or not, never get paid for the time they’ve missed, which is now one month and counting. That’s though a prior law mandates back pay.
And the unpaid workers are hurting, they told AFGE. Descriptions of the pain included:
- “Gas stations don’t take IOUs,” AFGE Council 100 Secretary-Treasurer Johnny Jones from the Transportation Security Administration told Business Insider. Several employees told him, “’This is my last fill-up and I won’t have any money,’ because they don’t have credit cards. They’re literally like, ‘This is the last tank of gas I’m going to have until I get paid again.’”
- “People are saying, ‘Well, when I get off work, I’m going to do Uber or DoorDash or Lyft or something like that because I need to put food on the table and I got a kid at home,’” Local 899 Treasurer Neal Gosman, a Transportation Security Administration worker in Minnesota, told Reuters. Some airports organized food drives for Transportation Security Officer colleagues.
- It’s not just food that’s lacking. Local 568 Vice President Mickey Alston told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that Palm Beach Airport workers “recently bought diapers” for a colleague “who was struggling.” TSOs—the airport screeners—at Palm Beach “are literally running of money to fill up the gas tanks of their cars to get to work.”
- The shutdown and the lack of pay take a big toll, even on people who aren’t federal workers. Food and Drug Administration worker Brian Garthwaite, president of Local 3381 in Rochester, Minn., told KTTC that furloughed younger workers—unpaid thanks to Trump—now stay home to take care of their kids, and let their child care workers go. They can’t afford the caregivers.
- Another Trump edict, banning telecommuting, hurts workers who otherwise want to work, said Local 4156’s Tierra Carter. She works at a Social Security call center in Tampa, Fla., and could easily work from home. The agency won’t let her, or anyone else, do so. It also won’t pay them. Carter told National Public Radio she had to seek a hardship cash withdrawal from her 401(k).
In a separate law, the GOP-run Congress gleefully passed, on party-line votes, complete defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund NPR and local stations. That’s been a long-time goal of Trump’s troops of radical right-wingers. Unless the local public radio stations, such as the one whose reporter interviewed Carter, find money, those workers are out of jobs, too.
If, when, or ever the shutdown ends, the workers will face an uphill battle against Trump and Vought for both pay and their jobs. That didn’t stop AFGE’s President Kelley and AFSCME President Saunders from lauding the judicial win. So did Skye Perryman, CEO of Democracy Forward, the pro bono attorneys group which represents unions—and others—in court battles against Trump’s authoritarianism.
“This decision affirms these threatened mass firings are likely illegal and blocks layoff notices from going out,” said Saunders. “Federal workers faced enough uncertainty from the administration’s relentless attacks on the important jobs they do to keep us safe and healthy. They deserve respect for the work they do–not to be treated as political pawns by the billionaires running this administration who see workers as expendable.”
The billionaires, of course, are and will benefit from the $4.5 trillion 10-year tax cut for corporations and the 1% which the GOP-run Congress enacted earlier this year, voting on party lines. That prompted the shutdown, because that same majority decided to partially pay for it via huge cuts in Medicaid and huge increases in private insurers’ health care premiums, especially for 22 million people on Obamacare.
But when the GOP needed Democratic U.S. Senate votes for a money bill to end the shutdown, the senators—so far—refused unless the health care cuts are reversed. There is no U.S. House of Representatives. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who jammed the money bill through, adjourned the House in mid-September and hasn’t called it back. His message to the Senate about the health-care-less money bill: Take it or leave it.
That’s even though workers in his own district are hurting, too.
“The government shutdown is not only cruel but unlawful,” said Kelley. “These are dedicated public servants who keep our nation running…We are pleased with the court’s ruling halting these unlawful terminations and preventing the administration from further targeting hardworking civil servants.”
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