An estimated 65,000 people tuned in to an evening webinar on March 13 where multiple unions and their allies raised awareness on how working-class people can help protect public services and civil servants in their communities fight back against the chainsaw cutting of jobs and programs by Republican President Donald Trump and his handler, multibillionaire Elon Musk.
Participants detailed the latest attacks against federal workers by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Their webinar occurred the same day a federal judge in San Francisco ordered multiple federal departments to immediately offer job reinstatement to at least 24,000 employees Trump terminated in mass firings in mid-February (see separate story).
“Let’s just call it what it is. We are facing a billionaire coup. They are attempting to take over everything and steal everything that is not nailed down,” said Paul Osadebe, a shop steward with Government Employees (AFGE) Local 476. “They are attacking public servants first and foremost because they think that they should have the ability to decide what has value in this society and who has value.
“And anything that doesn’t make money and put money in their pockets, they think that should just be cut outright.”
“An unelected billionaire,” Musk, “is literally wielding a chainsaw” against workers and their jobs “without thinking what it means to people’s lives,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, an Electrical Worker.
Webinar organizers, affiliated with the Federal Unionists Network, encouraged attendees to visit its website, www.savepublicservices.com. The site lets users join a rapid response network to be notified of emergency protests in their communities against cuts to public services. It’s also offering assistance to people looking to get involved in organizing efforts.
The network began in December and describes itself as “an informal association of federal unionists and our allies organizing to support each other in strengthening our unions, improving our agencies, and building solidarity across the federal sector of the labor movement.”
The webinar occurred the same day DOGE planned to enter the U.S. Postal Service. Though it’s not a federal agency, the highly unionized USPS is run by a presidentially named board and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, whom Trump foisted upon the Postal Service in mid-2020.
DeJoy, a former package company CEO and a right-wing GOP big giver signed a pact with DOGE to let its raiders into the Postal Service headquarters and its files and records.
DeJoy has implemented his own “reorganization” plan featuring sharply rising prices, slower deliveries, and plant closures, often designed to force workers to move long distances or quit. All that is similar to how Musk and Trump are carving up the federal government.
Trump has said in the past he wants to privatize the Postal Service, sell profitable sections to Wall Street and dump the rest. Postal unions plan a national day of action on March 20 against that scheme, one speaker said.
“Our strategy is to accelerate the mass backlash that we need to organize against the [Trump] administration,” said Chris Dols, president of Professional and Technical Employees Local 98 and a network co-founder. “That’s only going to work if we have rapid responses all over the country, every time mass firings hit another agency in a different city. And that’s what the Let Us Work! campaign is all about.”
Other speakers pointed out campaigners to help the federal workers must undertake an education job with people from the rest of the country. Those others, including Trump voters, don’t know or don’t realize how much they depend on federal services—and that the firings and closures are to fund a Trump-Musk-GOP tax cut for corporations and the rich.
“This isn’t about left versus right,” said Working Families Party Executive Director Maurice Mitchell. It’s “about top versus bottom, the rich versus the rest of us. Trump, Musk, and DOGE declared everyone else the enemy.”
Many speakers campaigned to make mass action constant. With lawmakers home for a week-long recess, organized labor will launch its own week of action, starting on St. Patrick’s Day.
“We’re trying to make sure the next time 30 workers get fired from your local Veterans Administration hospital, that 300 people turn out the next day and say ‘These jobs are too important, don’t let them get away with it,’” said Dols.
“The next time 50 people get fired from your Social Security office in your neighborhood, in your city, we need 500 people to turn out the next day to say ‘We need those people to help us guarantee that Social Security is accessible.’”
“This is the beginning of a movement,” declared Osadebe, a shop steward who represents workers at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Trump and Musk declared HUD must cut 44% of its staff. Trump terminated funds to 160 local pro-fair housing non-profit groups nationwide.
Workers and their allies must go to “every town, city, and village,” Osadebe added. “Hit the streets, hit the rallies, hit the picket lines, hit town halls, whatever.”
Other speakers were sharper. “We are seeing the beginning of the end of MAGA,” said Maurice Mitchell, director of the Working Families Party, one of many co-sponsors of the webinar.
He said MAGA’s demise is signaled by angry and upset people—deprived of jobs, services or both–jamming town halls Republican lawmakers hosted in the last congressional recess. Some literally booed the politicians off the stage. The uproar has been so great GOP leaders tell colleagues to not do town halls anymore.
Keep piling onto the lawmakers, urged Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees. “Tell them ‘enough of this B.S.’” he said.
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, declared “higher education workers”—from professors to sanitation engineers—“refuse to stand by while Elon Musk and Donald Trump” cut vital federally funded research programs whose workers could save people from dying from heart disease, for example.
“Trump’s cuts will kill people,” Wolfson declared, before announcing AAUP is planning its own National Day of Action for workers and programs, on April 8.
“We’re all being eviscerated,” added Jessica Tang, chair of the new Resistance Committee of Teachers/AFT Massachusetts. “This autocratic regime is taking away access to knowledge itself.”
The webinar lasted over two hours and included statements from federal workers, union presidents, and current and former politicians, all of whom gave similar opinions decrying the recent actions of GOP President Trump’s administration, including those by Trump’s puppeteer, Musk.
Osadebe and Dols summarized the key points of the webinar: Working-class people nationally must respond faster and need to be more organized than ever against the threats posed to public services.
“We’re not just talking about defeating the attacks that we’re facing, we’re showing that working people had the power, have the power, and always will have the power, so that this cannot happen again,” Osadebe said.
“When we build the durable connections to respond whenever people are attempting to steal and trample on our rights, they will not even try it next time because we have built the power to scare them out of the thought, and that’s when we have real power. That’s what we’re building tonight.”
To learn more about the Let Us Work! campaign, click here.
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