Workers are shouldering the cost of the longest government shutdown in history.
Over a million federal workers are not being paid. Thousands are at risk of losing their jobs. Millions of people did not receive SNAP benefits for November. Meanwhile, the Trump administration guarantees pay for sectors of the military, federal agents, and ICE.
Twelve days into the government shutdown, Vice President JD Vance threatened federal workers that they would feel the pain if Democrats did not agree to Republicans’ plan: “The longer this goes on, the deeper the cuts are going to be. To be clear, some of these cuts are going to be painful.” Beneath his usual grimace of performative empathy, Vance exposed the callous truth of this face off between the Democratic Party and Trump’s GOP: workers’ lives are nothing but a bargaining chip for the two imperialist parties.
Left out in the cold by the Democrats and Republicans, the working class and poor are left to sort it out for ourselves. All workers, public sector and private alike, must demand that our unions take the side — not of the representatives of the bosses — but of the workers and oppressed, using their might to force an end to the shutdown, an end to layoffs and full backpay for all those furloughed, full employment and a living wage for all to feed their families, universal healthcare, and an independent, combative plan of action to fight all of Trump’s attacks on the working class.
Trump Is On The Offense Against Workers
Over a month into the longest government shutdown in history, over 700 thousand federal workers have been furloughed without pay since September; another 700 thousand workers deemed “essential” are working without pay. Though the courts have intervened to block permanent layoffs for now, the Trump administration continues to set its sights on cutting the federal workforce, especially in the departments of Education, Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency. The administration is again signaling that it intends to refuse backpay for workers furloughed during the shutdown, flouting a 2019 law that is meant to ensure workers are paid back after a shutdown.
42 million people have not received their SNAP benefits, as tens of thousands of federal workers flock to food pantries and rely on mutual aid to feed their families. Of course banks have been quick to profit off of working people’s hardship, offering short-term loans to workers unable to pay their bills and without the savings to make it through the shutdown.
Flights across the country are being disrupted as airport workers are forced to continue working with severe staffing shortages. Behind the disruption in service and dangerous chaos at airports are the over 11,000 air traffic controllers and other workers who are being forced to work without pay. Many of them are faced with the choice of not showing up to work (risking their jobs), or being exhausted by working additional hours at other jobs just to make ends meet.
The shutdown has been the perfect opportunity for the Trump administration to continue its mission of cutting the federal workforce, forcing hundreds of thousands of people out of their jobs in a second wave of cuts since Elon Musk departed from DOGE. According to some estimations, around two hundred thousand jobs had been cut in the federal administration as of September 23. Those targeted for layoffs during the shutdown show that Trump is not concerned about making the government more “efficient,” but in advancing its chainsaw agenda, dissolving the remaining frayed threads of America’s social safety net and consolidating executive power to attack his enemies.
After all, the shutdown itself is the Democrats’ response to Trump’s attempts to eradicate the limited provisions of Obamacare. The funding package put forward by the Republican Party would send health insurance premiums skyrocketing, effectively cutting off the 24 million people who do not get insurance from a job from access to healthcare. It would also keep in place the cuts to healthcare programs for working and poor people established in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.
The Right is using the shutdown to punish its enemies while rewarding its allies. While the administration throws up its hands and once again claims there’s no money to pay federal workers or deliver SNAP benefits, it continues to pay politicians, as well as the military, ICE, and police. Trump enlisted billionaire Timothy Mellon to donate $130 million to the government to pay the military; the administration dipped into emergency funding to continue to pay ICE. And military deployments to the border continue apace to make sure no squabble in Congress affects Trump’s xenophobic war on immigrants. These extraordinary measures are of course due to the essential role these agents play in enforcing Trump’s agenda both domestically in the form of internal repression of immigrants and dissent, and internationally in the form of increasingly aggressive military and federal intervention at the U.S. border and in Venezuela and Latin America.
And as millions more people and families across the country face the fact that they don’t know where their next meal is going to come from, Trump is showing just who he represents. While Trump claims to be on the side of working people, his administration is threatening to starve workers and their families in order to make further cuts to social programs. Of course there is all the money in the world for Gatsby-themed Halloween parties for the ultra-wealthy and political elite, all the money in the world for a corrupt endeavor to construct a vanity wing of the White House with billionaire money in exchange for settled lawsuits.
So far the administration has been able to weather the storm of the shutdown. While federal courts were quick to intervene to cling to some semblance of stability as approval ratings for the government plummet and the capitalists gripe about lost profits, the Supreme Court once again ruled in Trump’s favor on the question of withholding SNAP benefits. It seems likely that the Democratic Party will cave and vote for Trump and the GOP’s funding bill to end the shutdown and stop the potential fallout from a shutdown that proves just how precarious most working-class people are in the richest country in the world.
Nevertheless there are signs that the shutdown may be accelerating anti-Trump sentiment, putting him in a weaker position. Despite divisions in the GOP over healthcare, the fact that the GOP is refusing to cede any ground to Democrats — no matter how much it takes a toll on the administration’s approval ratings — shows that this is Trump’s party through and through. Now Republicans are seeing that this comes at a cost, especially after the rebuke that Trump received at the polls in the most recent national elections and in the streets during the No Kings protest in October.
Democrats Are Mobilizing For The Next Election, Not To Protect Workers
The Democrats refused to fund the government supposedly in an attempt to protect healthcare for millions of working-class people in the United States and stand up to Trump. But this too-little, too-late maneuver is nothing but a play to capitalize on a narrow part of the most unpopular of Trump’s proposals to boost their own decrepit image and improve their chances in the 2026 elections.
The fact that they were ready to cave to the Republicans and accept a year-long extension of healthcare subsidies shows that this was never about ensuring that working people have access to medical care. Now that they have been the beneficiaries of anti-Trump sentiment during November’s elections, the Democrats are seeing this as a moment to project strength. As Senator Bernie Sanders said, Democrats “have got to remain strong” on extending Obamacare provisions, including “a commitment from the speaker of the House that he will support the legislation, and that the president will sign.” But while Democrats remain strong up on Capitol Hill, working people below are suffering each day that the shutdown continues.
But the shutdown is only useful to them until it starts to hurt their approval ratings. And despite their success in the elections, the Democratic Party remains deeply divided even on the question of just how much to stand up to Trump. It is likely that the right-wing of the party will cave without getting anything in return, while the progressive wing is betting that taking a stand now will improve Democrats’ standing in the view of the public. But this political oscillation between two dead end strategies makes clear that the Democrats will not be the ones to stand up to Trump. Until now, they have played by the rules, allowing Trump to move ahead with every single one of his attacks on working people, trans people, people of color, and immigrants. Democrats did not shut down the government to protest Trump’s rampant authoritarianism or attacks on immigrants and working people, but instead chose a safe political battle to score points against republicans toward the midterm elections. Ultimately the shutdown is part of a policy of normalizing Trump’s attacks on democratic rights, including attacks on workers rights and the right to protest.
The Democrats will not be the ones to stand up against Trump’s policies. In fact, they stand in the way of the working class and oppressed, uniting to fight back. Ultimately they have more in common with Trump and the Republicans than they have differences. That’s been true of their support for Genocide in Palestine and war in the Middle East, deportation of immigrants, and economic exploitation of billions of working people across the world. They will end the shutdown on their terms, not in the interests of the working class.
Workers Can Unite To End These Attacks. Unions Need To Take The Lead, Not Bow To Either Party Of Capital
The Democrats and Republicans are weaponizing — often and publicly — the suffering of our class during the shutdown. They claim to act in our interest, but this shutdown is about nothing other than their own political jockeying. They may end the shutdown, but this does not repair the damage done to working people or prepare them for the hardships to come after Trump and the GOP’s cuts to social services and what limited government healthcare programs still exist.
The only ones shouldering the burden of this shutdown — even after it ends — are working and poor people. A continuing shutdown means further economic hardship; accepting Republicans’ funding bill means further economic hardship. Workers need to find their own solution, uniting across sectors and organized and unorganized workers to demand better living conditions and an end to Trump’s attacks without anchoring their struggle to either party.
That means a fight by rank-and-file workers with the leaders of the labor movement to carve an independent path. Union leaders have entered the fray of the government shutdown, only to take the side of Republicans or Democrats. Federal workers unions were initially supportive of Democrats’ move to refuse to approve the government funding bill, ready to put up this fight for the entire working class to have access to healthcare. Now as they feel the burden of the shutdown, it’s becoming clear that no politician is coming to save them, including their leaders tied to the Democrats. Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, has called on Republicans to cede to Democrats’ demands and “extend the subsidies and open the government.” Throwing their lot in with the Democratic Party, they tie the futures of working-class people to a losing strategy that will not guarantee anyone healthcare.
Meanwhile, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien continues to throw his support behind Trump. He appeared alongside union leaders and bosses alike in a video for the White House denouncing the shutdown. O’Brien called on Democrats “to make the deal they should have made a long time ago” — a deal that would cut benefits for workers across the country without a real plan to fight to win healthcare and higher wages.
This is not a union leader doing everything in their power to end a shutdown that is harmful to workers; this is a bureaucrat vying for a better seat at the table to negotiate the terms of exploitation for the workers he represents, tying workers’ futures to the political power of a far-right politician who has done nothing in his second term other than fire workers, attack immigrant and Black and Brown workers, and give benefit after benefit to the capitalists and ultra-wealthy. O’Brien is stepping aside to let Trump go on the offense against workers.
The labor movement must organize across the country to demand that their unions mobilize so that workers do not pay the price of this government shutdown or Trump’s attacks. This must go beyond federal workers’ unions to include all organized workers. Millions of workers rely on Medicare and food stamps — this is their fight too; but millions more still struggle to access healthcare. Universal healthcare has been a rallying call of rank-and-file workers — healthcare workers among them — for years. This cannot be a fight to simply extend a healthcare system that doesn’t work, to fight for the devil we know; rather it presents an opportunity to build an independent fight to win universal healthcare for all. We need high quality, state-funded universal health care for everyone living in the country that can’t be taken or negotiated away by the two parties of capital.
But the force to win these kinds of demands is built by uniting the struggles of the working class against the attacks of the Trump administration. From the No Kings march to Trump’s beating in the elections and the resistance to his immigration agenda in Chicago, its clear that there exists deep discontent with Trump and his policies — policies that are not only denying basic rights to immigrants, but also increasing the cost of living and making life harsher for people of color, women, the LGBTQI+ community and all exploited and oppressed people in the United States.
To stop Trump we need working class independence. Labor must join the fight, as did workers in Italy and the Spanish State to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza. Rather than waiting for the Democrats and Republicans to end the shutdown, the labor movement and social movements need to organize the fightback. That means working people taking to the streets, shutting down their workplaces and schools until social services are re-established and every single worker is rehired with full backpay. But it can’t stop there. The Democrats and Republicans are likely to pass this latest funding bill, one that spells disaster for working people. We must unite our struggles to fight for full employment and a living wage for all people regardless of their immigration status, and an independent, combative plan of action to fight all of Trump’s attacks on the working class. This must be united with the struggles against ICE and the National Guard, against the genocide in Gaza, and against Trump’s repressive and Bonapartist policies and his occupations of major cities.
