The Point: Learning from the attacks on federal workers’ unions

9/11/2025

This week’s Point is written by Nick Juravich, Associate Professor of History and Labor Studies and author of the recently published Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education.  As always, The Point represents the views of the author and is not the official position of the FSU.

The end of August brought welcome news for FSU members, with our new contract taking effect and raises hitting our paychecks in the waning days of summer. The security and stability of union jobs and contracts remain essential bulwarks against precarious work and arbitrary dismissals in our troubled times. For our fellow workers in the federal government, however, Labor Day weekend brought only cruelty. The Trump administration used the occasion to broaden its attack on federal workers and their unions, stripping union contracts and rights from six new agencies and tens of thousands of federal workers. As of this writing, nearly half a million federal workers have lost their union protections as a result of executive orders, the single largest act of union busting in US history.

This is, to be clear, neither new nor surprising; the president issued the first of these orders in March, though legal challenges kept them at bay until August, and they closely follow the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” playbook. As these orders take effect, however, all of us who enjoy the projections of a public-sector union should take heed. The strategies of federal union busting have long served as models for wider attacks on the labor movement, as they did when Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981. Assessing the rhetoric, as well as the implications, of these federal orders and the agencies at which they have been rolled out can help us understand these anti-union strategies and, with luck, prepare to fight them. 

The primary explanation offered by the administration for eliminating union contracts and rights has been that the affected workers are “primarily” engaged in national security functions. These claims are both spurious and retaliatory. Provisions in federal law have long exempted some workers, but new exclusions include maintenance and facilities staff, nurses at VA hospitals, and whole agencies that have nothing to do with national defense. The orders also leave untouched those workers represented by unions that have supported the administration, including the Teamsters and several law enforcement unions, despite the fact that members of the latter are far more likely to be involved in national security.

The dubious argument that public-sector unions undermine public safety has a long history here in Boston, as our archivists and public historians have ably documented. When Boston Police formed a union and walked out on strike in September of 1919, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge called in the state militia rather than negotiate, fanning the flames of mob violence while blaming the chaos on the strikers. After crushing the strike, Coolidge rode his enhanced reputation to the vice-presidency, while the city blacklisted all those who walked out from ever working in law enforcement again. Boston did, however, give the raises and improved working conditions strikers sought to their freshly hired replacements, giving the lie to the notion that the strikers’ demands were incompatible with public safety. Despite a century of claims to the contrary, executives themselves have demonstrated—through their own inconsistency—that unions and union contracts pose no threat to national security or public safety.

Behind the specious public-safety explanation lurks another strategy, one that seeks to pit unionized workers against those they serve. The president has repeatedly highlighted the Veterans Administration (VA) in his comments, both because of its seeming proximity to national defense (though the vast majority of VA employees play no such role) and also because veterans are widely understood as both deserving and in need of public services. Putting veterans in the spotlight positions the administration to accuse any VA workers who take concerted action in defense of their jobs of abandoning the vets they serve. 

Educators, of course, are deeply familiar with this logic, which has long underpinned attacks on our unions. And just as Massachusetts Teachers Association locals across the state have won transformative contracts by highlighting the ways educators’ labor and students’ learning conditions are intertwined, VA workers are partnering with veterans’ organizations to highlight deteriorating conditions in VA hospitals and services as a result of the administration’s indiscriminate and unnecessary cuts. The resilience of state and municipal public-sector unionism over the past decade—in the face of many attacks and a deleterious Supreme Court decision—has relied, in large part, upon the alliances built between workers and those they serve.

Where, then, does this leave us? In the short term, we must continue to pressure our University administrators, as well as those elected to lead our city and state, to affirm our rights as unionized workers and stand with us in demonstrating that unionized workforces deliver high-quality services to safe, secure communities. Stalled and drawn-out contract negotiations, from which our colleagues in the PSU are now suffering, cannot be tolerated. Nor can state laws that curtail public-sector labor rights – including the right to strike – be allowed to persist in states that purport to offer an alternative to the union-busting agenda in Washington.

In the longer run, as public services come under continued attack, those of us who deliver them must continue to make common cause with those we serve to articulate ideas of what working public services can be and do. Before many federal workers enjoyed collective bargaining rights, they nonetheless joined unions, which served not only to advocate for workers on the job but to advance visions for a future in which the state served its citizens on equal footing. Once such union, the Federal Workers of America, opened an integrated canteen in segregated Washington, D.C. during the second World War. In a photo preserved at the Library of Congress, a young Pete Seeger entertains a multiracial crowd of locals and servicemen (the Armed Forces, too, remained segregated) at the canteen’s opening, with none other than Eleanor Roosevelt in the crowd. Uniting civil rights and labor demands, they offered a compelling vision of the future in dark times, one that might inspire us to do the same.

The committee for this year’s The Point currently includes Jessica Holden, Healey Library; Nick Juravich, History; Jeff Melnick, American Studies; and Steve Striffler, Labor Studies. If you want to join our committee, write an edition of The Point, or if you just have an idea, please write us at fsu@umb.edu.