Strike, or Else
As Trump tosses out the TSA union contract, everything is on the line.
The most important thing about a union contract is that it is a contract. It is a legally binding agreement. It is not a passing fancy. It is not an empty promise, a public relations ploy. It is a contract. It is a guarantee. The things that are laid out in the contract are guaranteed, for the length of the contract. Abiding by its provisions is mandatory, not optional.
This is a bedrock principle. It is why working people fight so hard to, first, win a union, and then—more fighting—to win a fair contract. The contract makes all of that effort worthwhile. Why? Because it is the ineradicable manifestation of what you have won. You may have struggled, and marched, and endured threats and retaliation, and poured years of energy into organizing, and a big reason why you kept going through all of those hardships is that you knew that once you won your contract, you would get what is in the contract. For well over a century, workers and bosses have fought bitterly over whether workers can have unions, and what those unions can do, and what is fair or unfair to put into contracts, but all of those battles are framed by a shared understanding that what goes into the contract is very important because contracts, once agreed to, are real.
There are some narrow and well defined scenarios in which a union contract might get tossed out before it expires—for example, certain types of private company sales give the buyer of the company the right not to honor an existing contract. (This was a theoretical possibility when Gawker Media was sold out of bankruptcy to Univision, and we in the union regarded it as such a serious threat that we made it clear we would walk out if Univision chose not to pick up the contract. They picked it up.) Such cases are predictable and rare. Apart from these narrow and well defined instances, union contracts are binding agreements for the length of the contract. If the employer dislikes something in the contract, their remedy is to renegotiate the contract when it expires. Not honoring the contract, or deciding to toss out the contract, is not an option. If it were, “contract” would mean something very different, and unions would be very different entities, and the entire history of organized labor would be different.
The inviolability of contracts does not just apply to the private sector. It also applies to the public sector. Here is a little thought experiment for you: In a nation where control of city and county and state and federal governments regularly changes hands every two or four years, what the fuck would be the point of negotiating union contracts that spanned elections, if any incoming elected leader was allowed to just toss out the contracts they don’t like? There would be no point. Again, the entire landscape of public sector unions would look very different if politicians were allowed to scrap union contracts on a whim. Doing that is not allowed. It is not a thing. Everyone knows that contracts are contracts. Are you happy that city and state and federal employees don’t walk off the job after every election? I bet you are, if you like your trash picked up or your fires extinguished or your drivers license applications processed. One reason workers do not walk off the job when political leadership changes is that they have union contracts that will endure. They know that their terms of employment will be as they are laid out in the contracts. This gives the government stability. It is a good thing. If newly elected politicians dislike the union contracts they inherit, they work it out at the bargaining table when the contracts are renegotiated.
Less than one year ago, tens of thousands of TSA employees who are members of AFGE signed a seven-year union contract. Today, the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security announced that “it is ending collective bargaining for the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) Transportation Security Officers.” In other words, just tearing up the contract. DHS didn’t even really try to put a fig leaf of legality on this action. The agency said bad things about the union— “The union has hindered merit-based performance recognition and advancement—that's not the American way,” for example—but did not say anything that sounds like a genuine legitimate argument for why they feel they can just exit a collective bargaining agreement six years before it expires. They just want to, so they say they are. That’s all.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers of PATCO, an event that is considered to be the single worst thing that happened to unions in America in my lifetime. It effectively declared open season on union power, intensifying organized labor’s ongoing decline for decades to come. What the Trump administration is doing now is worst than that. Reagan was an anti-union rat bastard, but he at least had the law on his side: PATCO was striking illegally, and it was legal for him to fire them. The Trump administration, by contrast, is operating fully outside of the law, firing untold thousands of federal workers and appointees without following the legal processes to do so—and now, tossing out union contracts at will.
The TSA workers who just had their collective bargaining agreement voided should strike. It is obnoxious for me, someone outside of the union, to say that they should strike. It’s real easy to say “strike,” but saying it does not take into account the massive logistical efforts usually necessary to pull off a large scale strike; nor does it take into account the very real existential risk that workers put themselves in by going on strike. They can lose their jobs, they can lose their livelihoods, they can lose their homes. It is illegal for federal workers to strike. AFGE, the union, will therefore never call a strike from the top down. A union spokesman today told me “We do not believe they have done this in an appropriate and legal manner. We are evaluating our legal options and will aggressively pursue every possible avenue to defend our members and the safety of the traveling public against this un-American union busting and retaliation.” The union means to take this to court and fight it out there, for whatever that is worth.
Knowing everything in the preceding paragraph to be true, I say again: The TSA workers should strike. Furthermore, the entirety of the labor movement should use whatever financial and logistical and political resources it has to help them strike. I say this not because I think a strike would be easy, but because the alternative to striking when your employer just announces that they are throwing your contract in the trash is to effectively accept that your employer can throw your contract in the trash, and still receive your labor. A union contract is an agreement that says “I will work for you under the conditions agreed to here.” Now, the Trump administration is saying: Work for us under whatever conditions we say. If you continue to work for them, your contract never meant anything.
Right now, these workers—and, by extension, all union members in the federal government, and in the public sector, and in the whole country—find themselves in a situation that is like being in a fourth floor apartment that is on fire. As the flames approach, you look out the window. It’s a long way down. Do you want to jump out of the window? No, but the alternative is burning up. So you have to jump, and hope that you survive. If you do not jump, you can be sure that you will not survive. You have two bad choices, but one of them is decidedly worse.
TSA workers have something going for them that most of their federal government peers who have been illegally laid off in recent weeks do not have: The fact that the Trump administration wants them to keep working. All of the workers at all of the federal agencies who have been canned by DOGE would be within their moral rights to strike, but their leverage is not great—to strike is to deny your labor to your employer, and if your employer doesn’t want your labor, your strike does not create a great deal of pressure. But the TSA? The government needs these people to continue working. Otherwise, air travel will grind to a halt, and that is an extremely serious matter. If airport security workers do not show up to work at even a few big airports, a crisis is created within a matter of hours that ripples out across the entire nation. To shut down air travel is a big, big deal. It very quickly creates a huge amount of anger among travelers, and a huge amount of pressure on the government to fix the situation. Fast. Workers who are critical parts of the aviation industry have a large amount of natural leverage. That is why the industry is one of the most highly unionized in the country. It is also why the government created special laws to restrict those workers’ ability to strike. The government knows damn well that any strike that shuts down airports is something that it cannot easily wave away. Workers who are chokepoints in air travel have too much inherent power, and that is why their right to strike is reined in.
The Trump administration would never do something so bold and outrageous as tossing out an active collective bargaining agreement if it thought that the TSA workers would strike. It is operating on the assumption that the union will whine, and run to court, but that the workers will keep working, and ultimately the government will prevail, because Trump is now a king and laws cannot control him. If and when this assumption proves correct, you can expect this pattern to be repeated, and very soon, government workers—the most heavily unionized sector of America—will find that their union contracts mean nothing. And that is the death of a system of worker power that millions of people have spent many decades building.
This, today, is a real crisis. Recognize that this is not just about 50,000 TSA workers. This is about the very existence of union power in America. When you are getting punched in the face over and over again, holding your hands at your side and repeating “Assault is illegal” is probably not going to be enough. You will take action, or else.
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Related reading: Listen: Republicans Do Not Want Unions to Exist; Sometimes You Either Strike or Accept Death; Getting Comfortable With Illegal Strikes; What Republicans Plan to Do to Labor If They Win; The Life and Death Stakes of Labor Power; Dark Times Are Coming.
Last year I published a book called “The Hammer,” which makes the argument that scaling up organized labor power is the best and perhaps only way out of America’s crisis of inequality. I think that the book is only getting more relevant with each passing week, although the sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach is growing more intense at the same time. Ugh. Anyhow, tomorrow night, Saturday, March 8 at 8 pm, I will be at the Brooklyn Library’s “Night at the Library” event, talking about this stuff in conversation with Alissa Quart. If you buy or bring a book I will sign it for you there.
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There are options besides striking. Since the union, itself, cannot call a strike, TSA workers need to stage actions independent of the union. Slowdowns at major hubs would be the most effective. It would ripple through the industry as either people miss connections or the airlines delay flights. Calling in sick is another option. The safest way to slow down the line would be to check carryon bags meticulously. Also, Have people walk through those silly machines several times. Eventually, the lines will back up and flights will be delayed. Baggage is another pressure point. Flights can’t leave if bags aren’t loaded and they can’t be loaded unless they are screened.
We need unions now more than ever. Solidarity.