WASHINGTON —Faced with an implacable hostile Republican administration in Washington, backed by what workers called “MAGA madness,” members of the Southern Workers Assembly, a rank-and-file organization that often is out front of union leaders, brainstormed via zoom on April 24 on how to combat the Trump agenda and its backers “with pushback and solidarity.”
The Southern Workers Assembly (SWA) describes itself as “a network of local unions, worker organizations, and organizing committees, committed to building rank-and-file democratic social movement unionism with a social justice agenda, defined by and accountable to the rank-and-file…for organizing, uniting and transforming labor power throughout the South.”
It plans to “help the most-militant worker/organizers form committees in major non-union workplaces,” link them in “public collective action networks” and “organize workers…in major non-union workplaces, regardless of NLRB election prospects.”
Founding members include United Electrical Workers Local 150, the Union of Southern Service Workers, Black Workers for Justice and the Charleston, S.C., Alliance for Fair Employment.
The webinar, which was described as the first in a series, was titled “Workers Fight Back vs MAGA Attacks.” Six worker speakers delivered remarks, calling “for a fightback to attack the economy,” for a general strike, for creation of a wide-ranging cross-class workers movement, and for massive withdrawals of workers’ money from banks that bankroll the corporate class, for example.
“We need to convene a gathering of all unions, and not just a day of action” but to plan mass and continual resistance, said longshore worker Leonard Riley. Billy Randal, of Truck Drivers for Economic Justice, proposed the attack on the economy.
And Keenan Anthony Sr., a longtime Postal Worker, advocated abandoning the anti-union banks.
“If everyone got together and pulled their money out of banks allied with the corporations, it would have more of an impact,” he stated, mentioning that this was one item on a list of over 100 tactics generated by members of the American Postal Workers Union. Demonstrating solidarity, Anthony added, “has to be a non-stop effort” out in the streets, too.
Anne Forester, president of the Richmond, Va., Education Association and a leader in a rank-and-file workers coalition in her home state, suggested others could follow the road which West Virginia teachers blazed in 2018: A statewide and successful “wildcat strike.”
The teachers in the Mountaineer State struck when the right-wing gerrymandered legislature and the right-wing governor proposed freezing their pay, cutting their pensions and diverting revenue voters in a referendum had earmarked for the schools to other projects and programs.
The wildcat strike began in deep-red Mingo County in far southern West Virginia and drew enthusiastic support from parents and students, especially since parents realized their kids wouldn’t get a good education if an exhausted teacher had to work two or three jobs just to put food on the table and a roof over her family’s heads. Other red states followed West Virginia.
Forester said other workers should consider that tactic again, a proposal that drew enthusiastic support from several other speakers.
The Trump government poses even more of a threat with its plans to eliminate the federal Department of Education, Forester warned. Trump, acting through his chainsaw man, multibillionaire Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has already cut half of the department’s staff at its D.C. headquarters.
Administered grants
Those 2,000 people administered grants for differently abled students and made sure students in Title I schools—those that educate poor kids—got the federal funds those schools needed. They’re gone and the money is in limbo.
And programs and people who promote diversity, equity and inclusion in U.S. public schools, which are now majority students of color, were axed, catering to the Trump administration’s racist and sexist prejudices. “We’ll be going back to the days of Jim Crow,” Forester said.
Forester warned her assembly colleagues, though, that Democrats abandon teachers and other workers, too. “Ultimately, both parties at the top will sell out working-class people,” she said.
Political analysts agree with her, which is one reason that a significant number, though not a majority, of working-class voters either sat out the 2024 election or switched to voting for Trump. The switch was enough to swing the overall popular plurality and electoral college majority to him.
Randal, the trucker, said workers shouldn’t be surprised at the hostility of the government or the corporate class. He reminded listeners that Wall Street financier Jay Gould, of the Gilded Age, “said in 1877, ‘I can hire half the working class to kill the other half,” and the attitude hasn’t changed since.
Randal traced corporate hostility through the World War I era, and corporate violence against striking Teamsters in the Twin Cities and striking Longshoremen in San Francisco in 1934. He came to Republican President Ronald Reagan’s firing of all 14,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981. They were striking over safety and inhumane working conditions.
And the AFL-CIO did little to help and certainly didn’t call a general strike, Randal said. The corporate class took that as a signal, Randal declared, to open war on unions and workers. Trump is just Reagan’s descendant, but on a larger scale.
Trump won’t stop with what he’s done already, warned James Jones, a former President of Government Employees Local 446 and a longtime National Park Service worker on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina.
“They’re getting ready to start more firings” of federal workers beyond the estimated 175,000 who have already lost their jobs, Jones warned.
“They’re going to gut agencies so they become dysfunctional, and then the billionaires will swoop in” and buy the remains, eager to make profits off of them and at the expense not just of the workers but everyone in the U.S., he explained.
Trump uses “national security” as an excuse, Jones pointed out. “But the administration doesn’t care and he doesn’t care.” And if Trump succeeds, “We’ll be living under a form of government of the rich and powerful and under a dictator.”
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