Boss Trump and Musk stage lockout – Workers fight back!

President Donald Trump got elected in November by gaming the capitalist electoral system with billions of dollars from Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, and a large section of the ruling class. Trump’s ruling-class credentials were better known than those of Kamala Harris, who was targeted by right-wingers using racism and misogyny.

The Trump/Musk regime is now openly fomenting economic, political and military warfare against workers and oppressed people across the country and internationally. The Trump machine is following the reactionary course of the Democratic President Joe Biden’s genocidal war on Gaza, but now he is bringing the war home. This is despite the fact that Trump’s vain attempt to disrupt the victory of Hamas hasn’t happened.

The Trump/Musk attack on government workers and federal programs is an attack on bourgeois democracy and the gains of hundreds of years of working-class struggle. This capitalist government is shutting down vital programs that help provide for people’s needs and laying off workers in what can be called a lockout against the working class. 

Lockouts are used by corporations against unions during a time when the class contradictions between the bosses and workers appear to be unsolvable. Historically, a lockout is a work stoppage during a labor dispute initiated by the bosses. The workers are locked out to enforce new regressive terms of employment such as a reduction in pay or benefits.

This was done in 1892 during the Homestead strike/lockout at Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill in Pennsylvania to force a wage cut. Players unions of the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and Major League Baseball have all been locked out by rich bosses in sports since the 1990s, shutting down the leagues for players and fans — but the players unions survived. 

In October 2013 — when ultraright Republicans in Washington, D.C., had withheld funding and shut down federal agencies like the National Labor Relations Board — Boston’s Democratic Mayor Menino and the transnational Veolia Transdev corporation locked out 1,000 Steelworker school bus drivers and fired their leadership in a futile attempt to break that historic local of largely Haitian and Black workers. More recently, the Honeywell corporation locked out United Auto Workers members for nine months, beginning in May 2016, in a contract dispute.

Locking out workers in 2025

This lockout of workers today involves hundreds of thousands of workers. Unelected centibillionaire Elon Musk, appointed by Trump to head the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has threatened and bamboozled 75,000 federal workers to accept buyouts and leave their jobs. But the lockout is also aimed at a host of vital social programs which affect the lives and welfare of the working class — in a country where the social safety net is already threadbare.

All the attacks by Trump and Musk are illegal, because Congress, with the power of the purse, has voted for money and resources for essential education, health care and housing programs and more.

Mass detentions of migrant workers have also escalated with hundreds of migrant workers being sent to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, alone. This is a campaign to lock migrant workers out of the country while separating families.

Large protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Trump’s scapegoating have taken place in California and elsewhere. Workers, including immigrants and transgender people, are answering the layoffs and cutbacks with protests at government institutions and workplaces all over the country.

System’s decline behind the cuts

The U.S. is the leader of the imperialist capitalist system, and the system is in disarray. There’s no returning to the golden days of U.S. imperialism of the early 1950s. Forget the “Make America Great Again” pipe dream of Trump. The capitalist system is in continual crisis, and the Trump/Musk program of destabilization is not going to get the ruling class out of the crisis.

What is needed now more than ever is worker solidarity, and this includes building fighting unions. With capitalism in decline,there might be a number of choke points where the working class could intervene. In February 2011, some 100,000 workers came out to surround and occupy the Wisconsin State Capitol to protest anti-labor legislation. Facing the Trump war on the workers today, many more workers could be organized for industrial and political action.