Opinion | Oliver Wells
The total number of Americans receiving unemployment reached its highest point in the last 3 years as it climbed to nearly 2 million workers last week. This continues the latest trends in layoffs across a variety of industries as the economy remains in crisis despite the Democrats’ claims to the contrary. Likewise, despite all of Trump’s claims of a “golden age” and his supposed concerns around the rising cost of living, his slew of executive orders have been fulfilling his promises of mass federal workforce layoffs while threatening even more with potential multi-trillion-dollar budget cuts.
While politicians and monopoly outlets claim the economy is still strong, citing high consumer spending, an article from USA Today points out that this spending is mainly among the rich, owing to gains in rising stocks and housing values. In other words, the claim by both party mafias of a strong economy is true for them and the billionaires they represent, not for the working class.
On top of the roughly two million Americans currently receiving unemployment benefits, over 200,000 more have applied and are awaiting a response. Millions more are unemployed but are not receiving benefits, as unemployment data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics from December put the total number close to 7 million. As noted elsewhere in the The Worker, “this data hides millions more behind it, such as those working part-time but are seeking full-time work, and those who are unemployed but no longer looking for work.”
The Trump administration is adding to this number with an executive order last week mandating the return of most federal employees to work in-person. Return to Office (RTO) mandates—lately implemented by various tech and finance monopolies, such as Amazon and JP Morgan—are what bourgeois economists have described as a “soft layoff” tactic, trying to coerce workers to quit so that the employer can avoid financial responsibility.
Days after the RTO, his administration sent out an email to around 2 million federal employees giving them the option to resign immediately in return for 8 months of compensation. The email mirrored an offer sent in 2022 by tech monopolist Elon Musk after purchasing Twitter and laying off staff, and even had the exact same subject line: “Fork in the road.”
Musk—a top fundraiser for Trump’s election campaign and now a key advisor—together with Trump had joked during a promotional event on the campaign trail to fire unionized federal employees, a promise the two billionaires are working to realize.
Unions representing federal workers have urged workers not to take the deal, citing that the administration may not uphold its end of the deal while also questioning its legality.
Contradictions among the US ruling class are also playing out in the battle over the state bureaucracy, with Trump’s attempt to freeze trillions of dollars in federal funding earlier this week temporarily halted by a federal judge. The case will be decided in a hearing on February 3rd, which will determine whether the freeze will go through or remain paused. Masked under the guise of an ideological and cultural struggle, the freeze attempts to gain the support of the most backward sections of the masses behind mass layoffs to transfer tax money to billionaires.
The freeze would not only lead to massive amounts of layoffs of both public and private workers across the country, but would also potentially threaten benefits such as free school meal programs and housing assistance. While the White House later clarified that benefits delivered to individuals such as medicaid and welfare benefits would not be affected, Trump’s style of shock and terror to see what he can get away with suggests this is only the beginning.
All administrations follow the trend of reactionization—the process inherent to imperialism in which power is increasingly concentrated in the executive branch, a reflection of monopolization, which becomes the only way to preserve their decomposing system. The difference in Trump’s economic and political shocks and the Democrats’ slow simmer is not what they are moving toward—the accumulation of capital and the maintenance of US imperialist hegemony—but their methods for getting there. Anything that is not fought for is taken, and anything that is taken must be fought for. This goes both ways—workers must organize to combat the imperialists and conquer more demands while resisting their encroachments, all toward the seizure of power to prevent reversals for their hard-won rights once and for all.
Photo: Billionaires President Trump and Elon Musk stand with far-right Argentinian President Javier Milei. Retrieved from WikiCommons.
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