By Mark Gruenberg
WASHINGTON—“I haven’t even received official notification that I’ve been fired,” a former Labor Department worker told People’s World during a watch party at AFL-CIO headquarters here last night where she joined a crowd observing Donald Trump’s speech to Congress. “I really loved this job and thought it would be a career.
“Now I’m going to lose health insurance in a month” after the final paycheck on March 7. As for other benefits, “I keep trying to find an answer, but the Department of Labor refuses to get back to me.”
“We knew for weeks what was coming,” the woman, who asked not to give her name, told People’s World. “But we didn’t know when. It was back and forth and back and forth” with the government’s Office of Personnel Management, its HR department.
That agency kept her supervisors in the dark, too. The Government Employees drew a big crowd in protesting the firings in front of OPM earlier in the day. “Fire Musk” and “Dump Musk” were among the milder signs.
“Now I have to sort out the options for recourse,” for being illegally fired, the worker continued. That’s thanks to court rulings AFL-CIO unions obtained against Musk, Trump and their “Department of Government Efficiency.” Musk claims millions of dollars in “savings” and so did Trump. But that’s another lie. Through the day of the speech, Musk kept revising the dollar savings downward.
A special target of the Trump-Musk cuts, not mentioned, of course, in his speech last night, was African-American workers. Brittany Anderson, interim executive director of Pride at Work, the AFL-CIO constituency group for LGBTQIA+ workers, did, however, at the federation “watch party.”
“There’s been an intentional multi-decade campaign by the ultra-wealthy corporate interests to part federal workers from the greater working class,” she said. “This is because federal jobs have been a significant gateway to the middle class, especially for Black Americans, women and also LGBTQIA+ people…
