The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I got work. All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we are recording this episode on Monday, October 20th, and the federal government has been shut down for nearly three weeks at this point. Although frankly, the term shutdown can be misleading because there’s still a lot happening in the federal government right now. As the New York Times reports, president Trump has repurposed money to fund military salaries during the government shutdown. He has pledged to find ways to make sure many in law enforcement get paid.

He has used the fiscal impasse to halt funding to democratic jurisdictions and is trying to lay off thousands of federal workers. Government shutdowns are usually resolved only after the pain they inflict on everyday Americans forces elected officials in Washington to come to an agreement. But as the shutdown nears a fourth week, Mr. Trump’s actions have instead reduced the pressure for an immediate resolution and pushed his political opponents to further dig in. We’re not going to bend. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leaders said on Friday, the 17th day of the shutdown we’re not going to break. He added all of these efforts to try to intimidate Democratic members of the House and the Senate are not going to work. He said. Now unlike past presidents, Mr. Trump appears to feel little urgency to strike a deal to reopen the government. Instead, he has used the shutdown, which began October 1st as an opportunity to further remake the Federal Bureaucracy and Jettison programs.

He does not like seizing on unorthodox budgetary maneuvers that some have called illegal administration. Officials appear undaunted by the criticism even after a federal judge temporarily blocked their efforts to conduct mass firings on Friday. Some agencies indicated in court filings that they might proceed with layoffs that officials suggested were not covered by the order. Russell T vote, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the architect of the effort to remake the government has pledged to quote, stay on offense throughout the shutdown. Now all of this is going on while at least 700,000 federal employees have been furloughed with nearly as many continuing to work without pay. And today we are speaking three of those furloughed federal workers. First, we are joined by Adam, who works in recreation for the US Forest Service, managing, hiking, biking, and equestrian trails in central Idaho. He’s also local president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, local 1753 and an organizer with the Federal Unionist Network.

We are also joined by Ellen, who works in SNAP oversight and administration at the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. Ellen is the chapter president of the National Treasury Employees Union, local 2 55 representing FNS employees at the Northeast Regional Office, and she’s an organizer with the Federal Unionist Network in Boston. And lastly, but not least, we are joined by April, who is National Treasury Employees Union, chapter two 50 president and who also works in the office of Head Start at the Administration for Children and Families Headquarters in Washington DC And they are all three here speaking on their own behalf. They’re not speaking on behalf of the government, of the agencies they work at or their unions. Adam, Ellen, April, thank you all so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it, especially with everything going on in the damn country right now. Everything going on in your lives right now. And I want to start there. I want to start with where we are here and now in the third week of this shutdown. And I wanted to ask if we could go around the table and first have you introduce yourselves and tell listeners a little more about the work that you do for the federal government and then if you can tell us what these past three weeks have been like for you.

Adam:

Thanks, Max. Yeah, like you said, my name is Adam. I work at Recreation for the US Forest Service and I run a trail program. We’ve maintained about 600 miles of hiking and biking trails, like you said, and it has already been a strange summer. We usually have about 10 permanent folks plus seasonal employees that can help us maintain trails, maintain trail heads, bathrooms, campsites, all that good stuff. Since the beginning of the year, we’re now down to just three of us because we lost so many folks before even the furlough started happening. But we lost folks due to the deferred resignation program. People were stepping out and stepping away from the agency just because of the toxic workplace that existed in February and ongoing. And once the shutdown started on day one, by the end of that day I was told that I would be furloughed or no longer using the words essential and non-essential.

But the feeling is pretty clear when they tell you that it just don’t bother coming into work the next day. So there’s plenty of things that will be happening. There’s definitely no trails getting maintained by the agency right now on any of the places that I work. And that’s about it as far as my agency work since the shutdown started. But definitely committing more deeply with my sudden free time to work within our union, within our local, trying to make sure that people who are still working are getting connected with resources and that they’re still getting informed on their rights. And as well as the people who have been furloughed who are not getting paid, just making sure that they know that they can turn to their fellow members for support, where to look for other resources that they might need. And then keeping everyone together because it does feel a little bit like that’s part of this process and who is working and who’s not working is to build up some divisiveness between all of us at the working level. So far, folks in the Forest Service have been pretty lucky. Those that are still working are still getting paid for at least through this pay period. At least there was some leftover funding and so far folks are getting paid, which is a benefit for us, at least at the agency.

Ellen:

Max. Thanks for having us on here today. So my name’s Ellen. I work at the Food and Nutrition Service, and we do a lot of things that FNS, we administer the 16 nutritional assistance programs that the federal government provides. So everything from SNAP to WIC to the school lunch program. I specifically worked in SNAP and made sure that the states had all their questions answered on how to actually give out SNAP benefits, how to determine if people were eligible. There’s a whole maze of regulations and rules that people have to follow. And so our job was to kind of parse that for the states, make it a little easier for them, and now it’s hard to not be doing that, to not be answering their questions, especially when the program changed so much in July, and there’ll be real penalties for them starting next year if they don’t get things right, they’ll have to start paying for a portion of SNAP benefits.

Their administrative costs are going to go up this time next year. And we are fielding a lot of questions on how do we pay for this? What are the kind of essential rules and regulations that we have to follow up until October one and then now we’re gone. I also worked in some of the auxiliary programs to SNAP that required some extra approval for funding. So there was a SNAP Nutrition education program that I worked on where actually on the last year of that program, because Congress decided to end its permanent funding status back in July, so there’s only funds left through September 30th, 2026. And so we were fielding a lot of questions on how do we run the last year of this program? How do we close it out, lay people off? And so now I’m not, my coworking bank weren’t there to answer those questions for folks.

So it’s been weird for people in the last three weeks of seeing everything unfolding in the hearing about how people are, not even just federal workers, but everyday working. People are concerned about how they’re going to put food on their tables as everything gets more expensive. And knowing that the programs that we administer might have questions going unanswered of how the states can fill the gaps, states and food banks, schools can fill the gaps that are left by the federal government. And we work in human service program, so we’re always thinking about the recipients at the end of the day. And we’re concerned not just about how we can get paychecks and how we can get put on the table, but how we can keep helping the people that are there. So I know a lot of my members are volunteering at food banks right now off of the time that we have left in our day and trying to help out and plug into their local communities where we can. I’ve trying to get the word out about what federal workers are doing and trying to organize with the Federal Unionist Network to keep getting the message out there and also trying to cohere my members still so that we don’t feel any sense of isolation from each other as we’re continuing to read the news, worrying about rifs and worrying about mass firings, trying to keep everyone together in these past three weeks. And hopefully we’ll stay together even longer than that.

April:

Yeah, it’s always so heavy to listen to because as part of Head Start, I, in addition to being chapter president, I work in policy. And so some of the things I was working on before, of course, are all the things that this administration hates. In fact, they were the first things to go. So I worked on the Office of Head Starts Equity plan, I helped with building all of the public comments for new head of regulations, and I manage the process of reports to Congress, all of the ones that are statutorily required. And I would just say that within HHS, it’s such a, I mean a lot of the same things are just happening across the government, but things are, we just have to constantly wait to see what the impact is and just constantly check in with each other. And our programs are so interlinked.

We’re watching what happens with snap because we know that our kids and families are also connected to that program. The same with tanf, the same with I represent employees who work in LA eap. So again, heating, but then there was a push to take and strip bargaining unit rights away from a good portion of my members in the Office of Refugee Resettlement. And so even though it seems like, okay, well they go to work just as regular, now they’re getting hit with debt letters for locality changes that are not their fault because they were told to come back and then got exceptions and then told that they would come back and some 50 if they lived 50 miles outside of whatever created things. And so they’re getting thousands of letters in debt and the agency you call and they’re like, we don’t know what these debt letters are either.

And I’d also say being specifically here in DC a lot of, and I’ll say that a lot of my members are black folks and very many of them are black women who have also just been very much more impacted when it comes to the shutdown because we’ve already been leaving in record numbers like the biggest exodus from the government in the history of the government in a country where those were some of the first stable jobs that black folks had and that unions had were essential to making happen. And so seeing this push out and exodus of folks who are generations of people who have worked in the government and have created a staple in communities. And then I, look, I live in DC and we have one of the highest populations of both poverty black folks and our welcoming in a lot of our migrant families and community members.

And so seeing that once our program specialists who have gotten hit the hardest, those are the people who do all the grants. They talk to the grantees knowing, but they also live over here. And so being in a new income bracket means having new needs, especially for kids. And so there’s just this interconnectedness with our lives as employees, just the not knowing also just like this is an abusive relationship with the government. I just want to say, and that, so this, it just seems like the snowball everywhere. And so there’s never a time when people are just talking about programs or just talking about their lives. They’re just so intertwined. So yeah, there’s that sense. But I also will say that people are really angry and my commentary on the labor movement in the United States is like they don’t have an organized way necessarily to do that. But I also see groups like fun coming and being like, all right, we got these wheels. We have some knowledge from generations. So I will say that’s also a change with some of the employees wanting to be becoming politicized or wanting to get active.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to pick up on that point because you put that really powerfully April, and it’s something that I’ve heard echoed in my conversations with other federal workers when you said that this is an abusive relationship and from the outside it sure as hell looks like that. And even as a citizen, it sure as hell feels that way to a lot of us right now. But as federal workers, as we already mentioned long before this shutdown began on October 1st, this has been a year unlike any other for you all and your coworkers. And I wanted to ask if we could just flesh that out a bit more, if we could get a worker’s eye view from your different sides of the federal workforce. Could you tell listeners a bit more about what it’s actually been like to work in the federal government over the past year leading up to the inauguration and from there to now?

Adam:

Yeah, I would say that earlier in 2025 when Russell V said, and not a direct quote here, but that they want to make federal workers’ lives miserable, that they want us to not be in the workplace, they want us to not work here anymore,

Maximillian Alvarez:

We want to put them in trauma where his exact words.

Adam:

Exactly. Exactly. And to have that be the overarching aura around you. Even when you work in a great workplace with people that really care about what they do and they care about each other and they want to hold each other up and provide these public services to Americans, that was the dark cloud that’s been hanging over us this whole year. And from the very beginning with those bullshit five points, which was just a waste of time, super patronizing and condescending to the probationary firings, the illegal terminations of thousands of probationary employees, our unions were able to fight to bring those people back, but they came back into the same environment with the media talking points and coming from politicians, blaming scapegoating federal workers. And it’s impossible for it not to feel like a toxic workplace. So many people took this deferred resignation program even if they weren’t already going to get fired or RIFed, because so many of the folks that I know that took it didn’t want to.

They felt coerced into doing it. They were coming to work every day being belittled by the administration, by the heads of many agencies. And then that’s why this shutdown doesn’t, to me feels like the next step. It just feels like the natural progression of the things that they’ve been trying to do this whole year of make our lives miserable, divide us and then use that as an excuse to cut public services that American people need. And it’s, this isn’t like some left versus right bullshit. This is like the billionaires and their political pawns versus the American people through the lens of federal workers and the services that we provide for everybody. And I think that that’s part of why the fund has been so important in this moment, and this is changing the narrative is that the importance of federal unions is in that our working conditions day-to-day, whatever agency we work in, those working conditions are the conditions of the public services that we provide for the American people. When we are supported in doing our jobs and we are allowed to do our jobs and we’re funded, we are the experts in our fields, this is our job. I jokingly say I smash rocks for a living, but I’m a pretty damn good trail builder. And when those jobs and all of our other jobs are on the cutting block, that directly impacts the American people.

Ellen:

When they say that they’re wanting to cut the Democrat programs and they only want to pay people that are deserving of it, I think it really shows it’s the billionaire versus the working people divide because what are the Democrat programs is programs like the food and nutrition programs is programs like April’s programs is programs that will keep the land public so that people can actually go and recreate on them instead of being just closed off or drilling or logging or whatever. And this whole year, it’s felt like them trying to make us miserable to make us leave so that they can cut our programs and say, look, that program’s not working anyway, so why don’t we just end snap or look, that funding’s not working anyway, and the refugees aren’t being resettled. I don’t know April, that’s the probably way of talking about it, but they’re trying to make us so miserable.

And in my workplace, at the very beginning, we were all hopeful. We were like, oh, we can stick it out as long as we stick together as an agency and as an office that we’ll make it out of these next four years together. We can pull up with anything. A lot of people had made it through the first Trump presidency and they’re like, it’s okay. Let us old heads guide y new workers through this. I was like, let’s go. And then they fired the probationary employees. I was like, oh, shoot. The people that I’ve worked with for the past year, maybe two years, for some people, their ary peers were a little bit longer. And then it’s like, well, do we still want to go on? Because our bosses still want us to do the same amount of work with you or people, and who knows if they’re going to come back and they’re trying to downsize the federal government.

Wilson wants to not only traumatize the federal workforce, but he wants to shrink it so that we can’t do the work that we are charged with doing. And since March, my office has faced threats of closures, and we’re seeing offices close across the nation too. So in Boston, the HHS office closed and the part of the Department of Education office closed. And so we keep thinking the house is going to drop, we’re going to close next. And it’s so hard doing the work, obviously in that kind of environment where I, I’ve been doing England, I want to support these New England states, but maybe I’ll have to move away so that I can keep doing my work or maybe they’ll just fire me so that I can’t do the work. Period. And morale, morale kind of sucked, but about half of my office has stuck around.

Half of us did not take the deferred reservation program, and it’s been like, if we can make it through, we’ve made it through these nine months so far, and we can make it through anything as long as we stick together. So solidarity has never been stronger. The feeling of support amongst each other has never been better, and there’s just a lot of dark humor around, but it’s whatever makes us feel better. At the end of the day, whatever gets a little laugh out of everybody, and I know a lot of people are turning to their coworkers. We have to spend so much more time together. We have to do our Zoom calls from the office now and drive two hours each day to be on teams calls, but it’s giving us time to talk in the hallways to commiserate about anything that’s going on and just try to lift each other up. And I feel like that’s what federal workers do. I feel like the’s, what fund does too, get to meet a bunch of other federal workers. And when people go out to rallies, I know that there’s lots of signs that the public are supportive of federal workers. And so it’s been great to see the public support too for us.

April:

Yeah, I think as someone who has been a part of whatever, how many shutdowns since 2013, I think it’s just so different. And so leading up to the election, it really was like, what do we do? And as federal workers, we’re very clear that it almost doesn’t matter. I mean, it matters how the elections go, but we know that things change fundamentally. Things change every few years based on whatever it could be on whatever’s hot, we’ll say that. And so there’s that part, but to what extent and how is that going to change what I do every day? Because for me, it wiped out all of the work. That was literally my entire performance plan in one day. It was like, oh, nah. And so I was like, oh, I’m the chopping block for, oh, we’re doing, we want to get rid of policy employees.

There’s one we want to get rid of people who are doing any kind of DEI work. And I was leading the whole, so I just was like, all right, so what does that mean? And we knew that going forward because there were things like Schedule F, and so I think it’s important to say the buildup was definitely there. I think there was a preparation emotionally, and I would say in the work we did that was just very cognizant of, okay, what things do we need to make sure are evergreen to ensure that we as employees are supported in the best ways?

How do we make that happen? What kind of new connections do we need to make between programs? So there was that, and then there was the hit, it literally was like all the shoes dropped day one, and it just was like, oh yeah, all the contingency plans and then no contingency plans because what is that? This whole thing, that whole thing called law and order that you would usually go to do anything, not even just fight back was completely broken. Who do you go to? Everybody’s like, did you get an answer on the HR line? Nope, nobody did. And then the next day it’s like there’s a whole new email that you write email, and then sometimes we’re not using this email anymore because nobody is here to take, and then when people get fired or they get ripped or put on administrative leave, nobody knows who they are until their email doesn’t work.

And there’s no way to know the work that they were doing, that there’s no access to any of those things. They just couldn’t go to work that day. And then to try to figure out for everything you do, okay, so can I still submit this? Because statutorily it has to be done. And then are we on the hook for not doing that part too? Probably. And then I think there came the fact where we knew even the ways in which they went, the ways that they went about attacking us weren’t even just using things that were already that they could use against us. It was brand new things and it was almost like throw everything up the wall and see what sticks. Obviously all of the administrative leave, the riff notices, AI is doing them so constantly just everybody’s service dates are wrong, everybody’s veteran status is wrong, but there’s nobody in the office to fix it being.

And I have a smile on my face because sometimes I forgot about the five points. There’s literally so much that happens day to day that you just don’t know. And then I think last month what I realized is I really had members who were saying, you know what? Because some of our employees got refire, right? They got fired twice, got brought back refire. They were just like, I don’t want to fight. Take my name off the MSVP lawsuit. I just don’t want to go through this anymore. And I don’t fault you. I’m going to need you to keep fighting, but I don’t fault you. It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting for them. I mean, I’m furloughed not getting paid, but some of the folks who went through two firings and stuff like that mean, so just over the last year has been every day. I mean, we go to log on and I’m like, deep breath. You don’t know if that’s the day you got to a notice. Your computer doesn’t work. So everybody who got riff notices last week, their computers just stopped working. So yeah, I mean it’s just never knowing anything.

Ellen:

If I could add on, there’s a level of paranoia that’s like a attached to everybody who’s still here because of that. Because there’s been, if the internet goes out of the office sometimes or the security thing that you scan your badge onto, if that just takes a little too long, but everyone’s just like, am I fired? And it’s like, that did not happen before. But now it just getting a lot worse and the technologies breaking down a lot more. There’s a lot of wifi issues, there’s a lot of system issues, and so everything is slowing down. So not only are they taking away people, but the systems that they’re supposed to be good at maintaining as the rich folk are not working anymore too. They built their fortunes off of making it systems and yet ours are, ours are breaking and making us think that we’re fired every week.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to pick up on that though, right? Because you guys mentioned in the beginning of this panel that it’s not just you and your coworkers whose lives are being impacted by all this. It is the millions and millions of Americans who depend on you and your labor and the services that your coworkers and your agencies provide, whether that’s people going to VA hospitals, people going to national parks, people looking for food assistance, housing assistance. This is one of the greatest tricks, these government efficiency, cost cutting folks. I mean, we’ve seen them, they’re new faces, but the same kind of story year after year. But they’re always pitching this as like, oh, government is bloated bureaucracy that’s wasting taxpayer money. We’re doing this to make the government more efficient for you, the American taxpayer. And so I wanted to kind of make that a two-part question for you all because you all said it feels like ages ago, but it wasn’t even like nine months ago that Elon fricking Musk was the head of Doge cutting departments left and and loading up everyone’s personal information into these unchecked AI systems that feels like forever ago.

And now here we are months later hearing that this is making our work life hell. So I wanted to ask a, are all these cuts, all this crap that you all have been enduring and that we’ve been watching, has it made the government more efficient? And B, how is this, what do you think people out there need to understand about how this is impacting the whole of American society? Like poor and working Americans across the board, not just folks working for the federal government?

Adam:

Yeah, I think that the ultimate irony of the push for efficiency is that the people doing the work on the ground, if had someone asked us, we definitely could have found ways to make these systems not only more efficient, but better for all working people, more productive. But that’s obviously not what they were trying to do. They’re trying to enrich the billionaires, the Doge cost how many billions of dollars? And then most of that was just to pay people to do nothing until the end of the fiscal year. No, I absolutely didn’t think things are more efficient now. Things feel more inefficient than ever. With all the firings and the resignations that have happened, people are struggling even more to do their jobs that they already were doing without the appropriate amount of funding or staff. And those jobs are now even harder. And I think that this is what’s so critically important that all working people need to understand is that we really feels like we’re on the front line of one of the front lines of this fight right now.

And federal employees administer nearly every single service that sustains daily life in America, whether that’s, like you said, healthcare for veterans, housing, clean air, clean water, food assistance, recreation, public lands, all sorts of other consumer protections. And the total impact on the budget to all of that is less than 5% of the total expenditure of the US. And for us to be able to provide all that we do for that little sliver of a budget and then to be told that that little sliver of the budget is where we need to make our cuts to efficiency just by removing public services for working class people, that is what’s been so frustrating to see that be such a big part of what they’re selling as a solution. And it’s really just another way to funnel wealth up. And it has honestly, it’s made me more than ever want to stay working as a federal employee.

I have this sudden and intense desire to hold the line and make sure that these public services are provided for everyone. And so fight to keep those. And I think that’s what a lot of us are trying to do in our unions and through fun and through these other community organizations is we swore an oath when we took these positions to defend the constitution and to provide these services to American people. And that is really what’s lit a fire I think under so many of us is that we are seeing these cuts happening and seeing reading between the lines on what’s going to happen to your everyday American when they don’t have social security or food assistance or Medicare. And I think that yeah, that’s definitely what’s engaged me and energized me even through the abusive relationship of being a Fed this past year.

Ellen:

Just mic drop on that. Yeah, it’s like how do you get more efficient if you are in a abusive relationship if you’re seeing your coworkers walk out the door, but I think everybody who’s staying behind is like, we have to be here. We have to hold the line because if we leave our positions then the programs that we administer, they might not have been gone immediately, but they’re going to break down further and further until they’re just not functional programs anymore. At some point, if you are trying to administer a program and all of your questions go unanswered about it and how you’re supposed to do things correctly, you’re going to make mistakes on accident until the whole thing just kind of breaks. You put the wrong screws in the wrong places, the machine is going to collapse. And we’re seeing a lot of that.

Things are so much slower now than they were eight months ago because so many people have left. I said earlier that half of my agency stayed, but really half of them left. And so we have to pick up half of the work with the same amount of people who are a little bit more traumatized, a little bit more like, what the hell’s going on? And we’re a little angrier now, so we want to hold the lie, but we don’t know exactly what we’re doing. And so things take a little bit longer. First we have to figure out what the heck somebody’s asking us to do, then we have to figure out how to do it, and then we have to figure out how to tell them to do it.

And sometimes we have to wait for somebody to tell us if we can tell them how to do it, if that makes any sense at all. We don’t have the clearance to answer certain questions with authority to make certain decisions that we used to have. By the way, they’ve taken a lot of autonomy away from federal workers because there’s an element of control, just like an abusive relationship where the abuser wants to do, wants you to do everything as they tell you to do it. And you can’t color outside the lines at all. But the federal government has worked for a long time, I think with federal workers who have had to do more with less. And we’re having to do that now. And we’ve usually been able to do that because we can be creative or we have a little bit of autonomy and we get to use our expertise to make some decisions and apply our discretion as professionals.

And that’s now kind of being taken away from us because discretion is not efficient maybe or makes some people look a little less powerful at the very least. And I think that’s why there’s some people have a little bit of a fire when things take a little bit longer to get resolved. We have to wait three months instead of three weeks to answer a question. It is the people at the other side of that question who wait a little bit longer. Most of the times when we’re solving things for our state partners for schools, when we’re answering their questions, it’s because they have a SNAP recipient, Rick recipient who has a situation that needs to be resolved. They have somebody who’s raising that question for us and there’s a novel situation. Maybe it’s a complex family situation, maybe it’s a woman who has to take in her relative’s kids and now they have a new family composition and they don’t know what to do and they’re trying to figure out how do I give the state is trying to figure out how do I give benefits to these kids and to this family so that they can get fed.

And when we take longer to answer those questions when we’re less efficient, and that’s a family who’s going hungry for a couple more days and I hate that.

April:

Yeah, I would say the thing that’s interesting to me about efficiency is I don’t actually think that anybody has a definition for that. The people who want it to be efficient, because then you think about ultra people, who are we paying for people who are poor and this and that? But put it this way. So if you believe so much in welfare to work, but you also want start childcare and pre-K to be defunded or dismantled, parents can’t go to work if the kids can’t go to childcare. And then if you can’t go to work because they have no childcare, then they can’t pay rent. So these billionaire developers, not only will they have issues with people being able to afford rent, which people can’t already, but new people are not going to have the income to move in either. So I think it’s not until people are impacted personally, until they feel it personally that they will take this seriously.

I don’t think they understand what the government does. And I’m talking about the public now. I don’t know that people know what the government does. I don’t think they understand what we do and don’t do or have, like you said, discretion or power to do even when we’re at our biggest or whatever and everybody’s at work. And so I just feel like efficiency for whom and where, because I mean now the farmers are like, so this is not exactly what we meant and that’s going to trickle down because food prices, food that we have for USDA, all of these things will start to happen and people will realize, oh, so we only got what we needed because we tried to make sure that everybody got what they needed. And so I don’t think that it’s, until people are like, why don’t you just open the government? So November 1st is coming, you may not have food. There’s all these things that might crash. And I don’t think it’s going to be until they’re just like, or the medical stuff, everybody’s Obamacare or whatever they want to call it. But when it goes up 200%, yeah, I think they’ll be like, oh, well maybe. I mean they might change the narrative and be like, that’s not Obamacare. That’s some other thing. But it’s not until they experience it themselves.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and just to sort of, I guess round us out on that note, I am sure folks listening to this, they have the same question that all of us have, which is like, when is this damn thing going to end? When is the government going to reopen? And in what condition is the government going to be if and when it does reopen? Right? I mean, I think we’ve covered a lot of that ground here and you guys have all been so helpful by giving our listeners as much information and perspective as you can, but I know I can’t keep you for much longer. And so I just wanted to sort of talk about where things go from here, both short term with this government shutdown and long-term with, like you guys said, the effort to hold the line before the country is totally unrecognizable to all of us.

And I guess I’m thinking about the fact that I was in DC this past weekend on the ground covering one of the thousands of no kings protests that happen across the country. I’m there talking to folks, seeing federal workers, seeing folks with signs supporting federal workers, and who do I bump into on the street? But our labor queen, president of the Association of Flight attendants, Sarah Nelson there with her family protesting, we did an interview on the ground and I got a chance to ask Sarah, she became a household name during the last government shutdown in 2019, the longest in America’s history up to this point. It was like 35 days, I believe. And I remember just like now, it felt like this shutdown could go on forever. There’s total gridlock between Democrats, republicans on the hill, and then a new player entered the chat, and that was labor and that was unions.

That was people like Sarah Nelson saying the words general strike if we don’t open the damn government. And all of a sudden people on Capitol Hill started moving very quickly to get the government open. And so I’m not saying that you guys are calling for a general strike, this is just my own personal reflection, but that was a really important moment in our history where I think a lot of working people learned that we don’t have to just sit around and wait to see what Democrats and Republicans on the hill do to decide our collective fate. There’s more that working people can do to change the situation here and to change the outcome. And so in that spirit, I just wanted to sort of go around the table one more time and ask if you had any kind of final thoughts or reflections for folks about what they can expect with the ongoing government shutdown, but also where the fight needs to be going forward with the Federal Unionist network or elsewhere. So anything you guys want to share, and then I promise I’ll let you go.

Adam:

One thing that was really empowering for me in the springtime with the illegal firings of probationary employees was the way that we saw communities step up and support federal workers in their area. Even in small towns where I work in McCall, Idaho, there was a bunch of local businesses that were ready to support fired employees. There was, people were putting together potlucks at local churches and stuff like that to make sure these folks were getting the support financially and in the food that they needed. And that I think is what’s going to have to become very important once again, as we near the end of the fourth week of the shutdown and people have gotten paychecks with $0 now, I think the impacts on the individual federal employees that are furloughed or working and not getting paid are pretty quickly going to become super important.

So connecting at the local level is always going to be the most important thing, whether that’s connecting with local unions, if you are in a union, get more active, reach out to your fellow workers across the private sector and the federal sector. I think where our power does and will eventually come from in a powerful way is where we as federal unions are also spending time connecting with all the other unions through central labor councils or state federations of AFL ccio and stuff like that, and being able to support each other there. And I think that going forward, state public services.com is where the big push and the federal unionist network is going. So that is open to federal employees, former federal employees, veterans and community allies, anyone who wants to save these public services, pick your favorite public service. And there’s action happening to keep it around and improve it.

And I think looking forward, that’s where the groundwork that we’re fighting that we’re building right now is yes, to resist a fascist authoritarian regime change by capital, but also we’re building a potential incredible future where the people on the ground doing the work, who know the people in their communities, know the services that they need, know how to provide them. We should be part of the conversation and the policy development. And I think that there’s, what keeps me going is that vision and then envisioning a world where the people who need the services and provide the services have a say. And it’s not just top down political puppetry.

Ellen:

I was just going to say a better world is possible if we build it. So everything that Adam said, get involved to your local community organizations. If you’re in a union, become more active. There’s definitely something that your union’s executive board needs your help with or your steward words or anybody who’s already involved in the union. There’s always a need for more hands on deck if you’re not unionized that get with your coworkers and talk about it. There’s a ton of organizations out there to help people form a union in their workplace. And sometimes there’s even people forming unions in their apartment building. So if you need to form a tenant union, you can go that way too. So any sort of union is a way to connect with other people and withhold labor, money, whatever, from capital so that the billionaires can’t continue to make our lives worse because what they’re doing to the federal sector is making everybody’s lives worse and they’re making life worse in other ways too that we haven’t even talked about today. We probably won’t and probably shouldn’t. So just get heck with your community, not just your friends with the people who you’re not friends with yet. Get it. Join your union. Go to save public services.com, especially if you’re a federal worker so you can get connected with the fun. Just again, join your union. I feel like that can’t be said. And

April:

Yeah, so many things. I think while we talked about general strike, right, and obviously we can’t strike, and I’m not saying we should strike, but I will say that I spent time with unions in South Korea in a country where they can do and do general strikes and the kind of general strikes that remove presidents. And again, not saying we should do that here, but the part of that that is powerful that we can learn from is just how much organizing matters and finding those points of unity. So I mean these were government, they were literally, they were our South Korean counterparts. They were the administration, fraternal affairs, they were HHS basically. And so really looking at how in each place there was a commitment to just because it’s not our chapter or even our local or even our union that we have decided that this thing they’re doing is that important, that we will show up the same way that they show up and that they learn to organize their workplace so that they can organize.

I mean, they’re very clear that we’re all workers. So there’s this worker solidarity that is then part of the community the way of moving. It’s just like, okay, we want a thing. We all need a thing. This is what we’re going to do. And so yeah, I just want to say organize, organize. Don’t think that you have to use big organizing words and all the things and training. If you have ever said, this is a thing we want and I think we should get it, you can organize some people and can do that again and again. And so the last thing is these big rallies, love them, have done them. But the thing that we still need to strengthen is absorption. We need to have a way to say, alright, people are engaged, they are ready to do something, have a way to plug people into work that’s being done or support what people want to do that they don’t see, right?

That it’s great to get together, but that should be a moment of where we’re feeling like, oh, there’s more people who feel the way we do that want to do some things and let’s get together. And so let’s create those opportunities, like solid opportunities that we can say, Hey, come and work with fun. We’re doing these things. Or come and work with this labor council or mutual aid. I’m part of east of the River Mutual Aid here in DC and we are still delivering free groceries and household goods since the first week of the shutdown. And many of us are also union members, and so we share information. And so what we know is if Snap in DC goes aways 123,000 people who will be impacted. So what do we do to say yes, whether we’re working or not, people got to eat. So how do we take care of these basic survival needs as a community? So yeah, I mean that’s my thing is organize, organize, organize, absorb people and realize mutual aid is we need each other to survive. So yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our guests, Adam, Ellen, and April, all three federal workers who have been furloughed while the government is shut down. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.