I’m from Canada and I find it very confusing that US federal workers haven’t gone on strike with all the BS being pulled by DOGE. I feel pretty confident that if the same thing was done in Canada with random mass layoffs of critical services and hostile takeovers of critical infrastructure, that there would be a general strike of federal employees. Why has there been no labour action in the states?
Lots of good replies here but I’ll respond to this one. It’s pretty crazy that striking is illegal for federal workers. I never considered Canada a bastion of worker solidarity but our public sector unions are very strong.
In Ontario a few years back, the provincial government said it was going to pre-emptively introduce legislation to prevent one of the public sector unions from striking. The union responded by saying they would do it anyways. This very quickly spiraled into a threat of a general strike not just from the other public sector unions but also private sector unions. The legislation was rolled back after just one week (Decent write-up here).
So it is surprising for me to hear how the public sector unions in the states are so weak and I’m amazed that such blatantly anti-worker legislation was able to be introduced. In Canada, strong unions and stability of work are some major selling points of government employment and I guess I’m surprised government employees aren’t standing up for those benefits. Is there a perception that this will all just blow over in four years and if they can weather the storm, it will work out in the end?
Unfortunately for Americans too, solidarity striking (the main premise behind being able to perform a General Strike), is also illegal (most citations I could find cite 29 U.S.C. § 158(b)(4) though I couldn’t work out specifically what verbage outlawed it). Keep in mind to that this specific labor law only applies to private labor unions that are administered by the NLRB, federal unions have a different agency.
I know a few people, including a family member, that work for the federal government, and I think they want to try to weather the storm, but it’s hard. Trump wasn’t a fluke in 2016 and he certainly isn’t one now. Just because he and his party might be out of power in 4 years doesn’t mean much. Half the country still thinks their jobs and livelihood are superfluous at best and harmful at worst. And with four more years of the hack and slash mentality going, it may take a while to rebuild all of this. To get from the precursors to the New Deal through to the EPA was almost 50 years of slow progress.
One thing that I think doesn’t get pointed out enough is that for the United States, the number of federal employees (pre-Musk) is basically the same as it was in the early 60s. The actual size of the federal government hasn’t changed in 60 years by any appreciable amount. All that extra revenue and debt in the budget has gone to federal contractors.