In March 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that effectively revoked collective bargaining for a significant portion of the federal workforce. Claiming “national security concerns” and invoking a seldom-used provision of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the order targeted agencies including the Departments of Defense, Justice, State, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency. This action impacted approximately one million workers or 67% of federal employees and 75% of unionized federal workers. This is largest assault on the established unions since the breaking of the 1981 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike by the Reagan Administration, which culminated in their decertification and opened a period of mass membership declines across the unions from which they still have not recovered. Thus, the recent decree by the Trump administration abolishing the so-called “collective bargaining rights” for most federal workers has been met with cries of outrage from the boss-linked leadership within the unions and the legalist champions of the capitalist state’s “fairness.” But the Marxist party knows collective bargaining is but a weapon of the bourgeoisie, an instrument forged in the counter-revolutionary furnace of class collaboration. The National Labor Relations Board, like its counterparts in every capitalist country, exists not to empower the proletariat but to domesticate it, to enshrine its subjugation within the sterile confines of legality and procedure. The “right to bargain” is the right to negotiate the terms of exploitation, never its abolition.

The Trump decree does not represent a break with democracy, but its fulfillment. For when capital no longer requires the mask of conciliation, it discards it without ceremony. The illusion of neutrality is cast aside, and the state reaffirms itself as the executive committee of the ruling class. The mis-leaders of labor weep not because exploitation has deepened which they accept but because their privileged role as mediators has been threatened.

It is not for the communists to defend collective bargaining, nor the unions which enforce it. It is for the party to expose their function, to unmask the lie that the working class can secure dignity and peaceful co-existence through negotiation with its enemy. The obliteration of collective bargaining amid the massive cuts to the capitalist states bureaucracy and the expropriation of the middle classes are all part of the deepening crisis of capital which will one day obliterate the last vestiges of the parasitic labor aristocracy and return the masses to the grounds of the class struggle. The federal worker must not demand the return of bargaining tables, but prepare for the return of the generalized strike and the class union.