WASHINGTON—“I haven’t even received official notification that I’ve been fired,” a former Labor Department worker told People’s World during a watch party at AFL-CIO headquarters here last night where she joined a crowd observing Donald Trump’s speech to Congress. “I really loved this job and thought it would be a career.
“Now I’m going to lose health insurance in a month” after the final paycheck on March 7. As for other benefits, “I keep trying to find an answer, but the Department of Labor refuses to get back to me.”
“We knew for weeks what was coming,” the woman, who asked not to give her name, told People’s World. “But we didn’t know when. It was back and forth and back and forth” with the government’s Office of Personnel Management, its HR department.
That agency kept her supervisors in the dark, too. The Government Employees drew a big crowd in protesting the firings in front of OPM earlier in the day. “Fire Musk” and “Dump Musk” were among the milder signs.
“Now I have to sort out the options for recourse,” for being illegally fired, the worker continued. That’s thanks to court rulings AFL-CIO unions obtained against Musk, Trump and their “Department of Government Efficiency.” Musk claims millions of dollars in “savings” and so did Trump. But that’s another lie. Through the day of the speech, Musk kept revising the dollar savings downward.
A special target of the Trump-Musk cuts, not mentioned, of course, in his speech last night, was African-American workers. Brittany Anderson, interim executive director of Pride at Work, the AFL-CIO constituency group for LGBTQIA+ workers, did, however, at the federation “watch party.”
“There’s been an intentional multi-decade campaign by the ultra-wealthy corporate interests to part federal workers from the greater working class,” she said. “This is because federal jobs have been a significant gateway to the middle class, especially for Black Americans, women and also LGBTQIA+ people.”
Trump boasted of firing federal workers, via Musk—a total which National Federation of Federal Employees/Machinists sector President Randy Erwin says has now reached 175,000. Trump didn’t talk about the impact on real people’s lives. Attendees at the AFL-CIO watch party did.
There, Erwin pointed out all were illegally fired, and said the AFL-CIO has won over two dozen lawsuits, and counting, against Musk and Trump and their anti-worker tactics, closedowns and cuts.
From start to finish, Trump pulled imaginary numbers out of thin air or his own mind to justify his policies, his roundups of migrants and his puppeteer Elon Musk’s chainsaw approach to government workers. Trump even alleged Social Security pays retirement income to someone 350 years old.
Pumped out lies
As expected, the Trump speech last night, in addition to ignoring how he has ruined the lives of so many workers, pumped out an incredible barrage of lies.
Among the lies: That he, in his first term, had “the best economy ever.” And that predecessor Democrat Joe Biden was singularly responsible for raging inflation and a deep recession. No mention, of course, was made by his allowing the pandemic to kill so many more than it would have had he acted on time.
Among the other lies was one that blamed almost the entire world for “taking advantage of us for years.”
The role of U.S. imperialism in plundering the planet and impoverishing millions on all continents in the process was, of course, left out of the speech.
His panacea of a solution, starting April 2, was worldwide tariffs on almost everything.
Big sections of Trump’s own capitalist class doesn’t believe him on tariffs. Markets crashed as he announced them.
Among Trump false “statistics,” he claimed there are 22 million undocumented people in the U.S. He called them “murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and people from insane asylums.” He charged Biden “let them all in.” Trump promises to “get rid of them all.” The actual number is 10 million-11 million. Most arrived long before Biden’s term or Trump’s first term, 2017-21.
The Republican attitude? Never mind that he was lying. They repeatedly jumped up and down to cheer.
Democrats sat on their hands, or brandished signs saying “resist” and “lies.” One House Republican ripped a House Democrat’s sign out of her hands and threw it on the floor.
Dozens of Democrats, including Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., a Painter, and Rep, Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash, former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, walked out. Before walking out, Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., the House’s youngest member, took off his suit jacket to show a black T-shirt lettered in white, stating, “No Kings live here.”
Others, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., skipped the speech. Trump retorted with campaign insults, such as calling Sen. Elizbeth Warren, D-Mass., a former Harvard economics professor, “Pocahontas.” Warren sat quietly, taking notes.
Trump “has been very effective in creating what I would call ‘a parallel universe,’” Sanders posted in a video on twitter/X. That universe either “has no basis in reality or is nowhere near the most important concerns of the American people.” One such concern he mentioned, and Trump didn’t: Climate change.
One Democrat was thrown out: Rep. Al Green, a Black congressman from Houston. He interrupted Trump with denunciations of the Republican’s lies that he would not touch Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Had him thrown out
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had the Sergeant-at-Arms manhandle Green out of the chamber.
The congressman, who has already filed an impeachment resolution against Trump for “dastardly deeds proposed and dastardly deeds done,” defiantly stalked out, brandishing his wooden cane.
The remaining Democrats at the end started chanting “January 6th, January 6th,” a reminder of the Trump-ordered U.S. Capitol invasion, insurrection and attempted coup d’etat by a horde of Trumpites four years ago. Trump pardoned all 1,500 who have been indicted, tried, convicted or sentenced.
Unions took the same attitude towards Trump’s lies, with the added vow they’ll continue to fight him “in Congress and in the courts,” as NFFE’s Irwin said.
“Working people need real solutions to things like the rising cost of groceries, housing that gets more unaffordable by the day, and a sense of stability in the world,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “All I’m hearing about is what divides us.
“Not only is that unsatisfying, It’s unsettling. It’s unsettling because when I go around, state to state, job site to job site, what I see for the most part is the opposite of that.
“I see the working class united in how fed up they are with the system we live in—a system where CEOs at our largest companies make 238 times what we make. A system where we work too many hours just to live paycheck-to-paycheck, still without enough time to spend with our families or afford the things we actually need.
“A system where an unelected billionaire is literally taking a chainsaw to cut critical government services, and fire our veterans without any thought or regard to the negative impact and consequences on everyday working people’s lives.
“The other thing I hear when I talk to workers—teachers, electricians, nurses, engineers, retail workers, bus drivers—is they want to feel secure. They want to know what they can expect when they wake up in the morning from their bosses, from their jobs, from their government. They want common sense.
“That goes for Democrats, Republicans, Independents. And I’d encourage every worker out there tonight to ask themselves: Am I getting common sense right now?”
“There was nothing normal about Donald Trump’s address,” said Teachers/AFT President Randi Weingarten. “He spelled out a dark, dystopian vision for a go-it-alone country that has winners and losers as opposed to one that offers opportunity and freedom for all. He offered no positive vision for helping regular folks get ahead.
“He said virtually nothing about improving education, how to help make America more affordable again or how to achieve the American dream. He ignored critical issues like housing, child care, healthcare and grocery prices, and he endorsed Elon Musk’s gutting of essential government programs including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
“Trump is betraying the working people he promised to help. He is not doing anything to lower costs. Sadly the trade war he ushered in and his false statements about Social Security fraud are big warning signs that everyday Americans are about to take an even bigger hit.
“Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities. With Trump, the rich will get richer and the rest of us will pay the price.”
Trump’s tariffs will hit workers hard. Economic analysts calculated the tariffs on Canadian and Mexican steel and aluminum alone would wipe out the profits—and thus workers’ profit-sharing bonuses the Auto Workers negotiated—at Ford, GM and Stellantis, formerly FiatChrysler.
Unite HERE Culinary Workers Local 226 in Las Vegas, which has 50,000 members, said tariffs “jack up the cost of food, housing, and everyday essentials for working families while putting thousands of hospitality jobs at risk,” said Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge. “Instead of taking on corporate price gouging, Republicans are choosing to create economic chaos that will make it harder for workers to make ends meet.
“Workers in Nevada deserve better. We won’t stand by while Trump threatens workers, immigrant families, our jobs, our wages, and our futures.”
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