I’m from Chicago, and I work for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Chicago. I can’t speak for the agency that I work for, so these are my personal views and my views as the president of my union.

I’m a geologist by training, and I work in one of our permitting departments protecting the investments that the country has made in things like levees and dams and ports and waterways. I’ve been with the Army Corps for thirteen years. I’ve worked in a few different offices around the country, but I’ve been with Chicago for about the last seven years.

For the last five years, I’ve been the president of Local 777 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. IFPTE is an AFL-CIO union. The local that I represent is a wall-to-wall union, so we have members who are scientists and engineers, economists, planners, administrative workers, and budget analysts. But then we also have park rangers, equipment operators, and mechanics, and we even have a tugboat crew on Lake Michigan. So we represent a very diverse bargaining unit.

If your readers don’t know, the federal government has an open shop system. So we represent all workers, whether they join the union or not, in terms of collective bargaining and as individuals who might be pulled into an investigation or something like that.

Before I came to Chicago, I worked in the Kansas City district. I led the employee union there as well, but it was actually a local of the Laborers’ Union. Before that, when I was in graduate school, I was in the teachers’ union. I’m the son of a union teacher and the grandson of a union teacher. My mom and my grandma were both union activists in the state of Missouri, where teachers don’t have the right to strike or even real, full collective bargaining. They have rights to what they call “meet and confer.” But even then, they had to be creative in their activism, and they had to be adaptable. That’s how I got to where I’m leading a local of public sector workers.

Elon Musk is taking over the government and bringing with him well-documented practices that these so-called union avoidance firms bring to the private sector. They try to confuse everyone and sow discord. They try to sow fear, and they try to convince everybody that their situation is helpless. And whether it’s lawful or not, they do have a tremendous amount of power and control right now. So they are taking actions that are scaring people and making them feel helpless, depressed, confused, and upset.

But the flip side of that is that federal workers have been under attack for a long time. This is an escalation. It’s a dramatic departure from more than just norms of behavior. Many of these things are blatantly illegal, if not unconstitutional. But they are in many ways a continuation or an escalation of a longstanding trend of underfunding workers and using workers as political pawns and scapegoats.

We have government shutdowns and threats of government shutdowns. We have continuing resolutions saying that the system itself is broken and wasteful, and it’s the federal workers who get blamed for those inefficiencies.

My response to people who buy into that is that it comes down to basic civics. Most government workers are funded by congressional appropriations. And that sounds very fancy and very inaccessible. But the reality is that we send representatives from our communities to make decisions about how federal money gets spent. When I go to work, when my fellow federal workers go to work, we don’t work on things that Congress didn’t give us money for — that would be against the law. We take trainings every year, sometimes multiple times a year, to understand how fiscal law works in the United States.

So our work is set by the priorities of Congress. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Federal workers — whether they’re in the executive branch, like most of us are, or in one of the other branches of government — are going to work doing a job where they didn’t set the priorities, and they didn’t set the mission.

The different branches of government are supposed to work together to determine these missions and constrain each other. And when that happens, as it does every day, we do things like make sure that towns don’t flood. We make sure that boats can come into harbors and barges can go down waterways. We make sure that bridges can lift out of the way. Those are examples from my agency, but you can see it all over. We, as federal workers, are making sure that a person who’s contributed to their community their whole life doesn’t wind up miserable, suffering on the street in their old age. We make sure that kids who need medical treatment can get it. We make sure that our parks have grass and air that we can breathe. We make sure that there are fish in the river instead of chemicals that catch on fire.

The proof that federal workers are not some lazy pile of largesse is in the fact that our world sees the benefits of our work every day.

For more than fifty years, the federal government has explicitly held out a policy of being a model employer for the rest of our economy. The people taking over our government by force right now are the same people would like to have us peeing in bottles in the back of an Amazon van, or working eighty-hour weeks, or dying in a warehouse during a tornado or a hurricane. These are literally the same people, and what they would like to gaslight us into thinking is that there’s no alternative.

And so we’re not even just talking about pensions. We’re not just talking about telework or these kinds of things. We’re talking about the forty-hour workweek. And anybody who’s familiar with the concept of organized labor understands that even in a right-to-work area, even in the harshest labor market, a union shop raises the working conditions for every worker in that market.

The federal government is that for our entire economy. And what these guys are trying to do is obliterate the federal government as a model employer, which will lower the working conditions and the working standards for every working-class person. And then they will try to tell you that there’s no other alternative, because they won’t have the federal government standing there in opposition to what they’re saying.

Approximately half of federal workers who are eligible to be represented by a union are currently represented. A lot of the bargaining units in some places have been carved up and fractured, so it’s hard. I think if you’re using a traditional model of well-defined jurisdictions and unions that avoid stepping on each other’s toes, that can be really counterproductive to building sectoral power in the federal government.

There are a number of us who are working to build a sectoral strategy. We’re calling it the Federal Unionist Network. It’s designed at its very root to be a rank-and-file movement that is agnostic about union affiliations, federal government agency affiliations, and different crafts or industrial groups. The diversity in all of those things builds our power and be there for each other’s battles. I think that this project that we’re embarking on is a critical complement to what the national unions are doing.

You asked what unions are doing. Over the last three weeks, as we’ve seen these appalling behaviors by the administration, we’ve also seen our unions having rallies and filing lawsuits. My local union filed a complaint against the Office of Personnel Management, because, as far as we can tell, this is the first time an administration has ever tried to directly bargain with every federal employee at the same time. So we filed that claim. It’s going to work its way through the process.

There’s a place for legal and bureaucratic action and paperwork. I say that lovingly, as a guy who processes permits for a living. If we need to, we go to arbitration, or the Labor Relations Authority, or the courts. Those things all have their place, and I believe in the rule of law that the Republican Party loves to talk about so much. I don’t think it’s dead yet.

But I also think we need to supplement it with a broad, open, radical approach. The rules of the game are changing around us, and we have to be ready to adapt. Being able to scale and pivot are the skills that our movement is going to need.

FUN gathered in Washington, DC, a few years ago. We also had a fantastic gathering at Labor Notes, not this last summer but the summer before. We’ve been talking about this sectoral approach, bargaining for the common good, and this ability to build bridges across lines that traditionally would have stopped collaborations.

So that’s what we are working on as a complement to what our national unions are doing. And they both have their place. It’s really exciting right now to see how all of these cylinders are firing at the same time.

Whether you want to call it the FUN or the FU Network, depending on how you’re feeling, it is an informal network of rank-and-file unionists. We started very informally in roughly 2021. We were trying to rally around the need for the Senate to confirm a pro-worker majority at the Federal Labor Relations Authority during President Joe Biden’s administration.

President Biden had made the nominations, and they were there for confirmation, and it wasn’t happening. Unlike Donald Trump, who just fires the members of these boards illegally, Biden didn’t do that. Instead, we had an anti-worker majority doing legal damage to workers for more than a year. Workers were hurting because of inaction by the Senate.

And so we met the very first time to discuss that. We did a broad letter-writing campaign where we were asking unions to sign on to an open letter to Chuck Schumer. And that advocacy built into the FUN.

The next catalyzing event was at the Labor Notes Conference in Chicago, and we had a fantastic meeting there. We even had public sector unionists from Japan sit in on a session that we had, learning about our work. And just the other day one of the FUN participants was working with Canadian unionists in their public sector.

This is not solely an issue for the United States federal government. It is a struggle that working people face all over the globe. The tendencies exhibited by numerous world governments toward autocratic and, at times, even fascist regimes, which exploit public employees as scapegoats, regrettably extend beyond our borders. So we are doing our best to be in solidarity with every worker we can, especially in the federal sector and our equivalents around the world.

Tonight we’ve got an event at Busboys and Poets in DC, where we’re inviting as many federal union workers as we can to join us. We’re going to have some political representatives speaking, including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

We’re going to bolster each other’s spirits. You asked how the mood was, and I said that people were scared and people were worried. And that’s true. But the other thing is that we’re finding power in solidarity, and we’re finding hope in our righteous indignation at the class war that they’re stoking here.

We are coming together to talk about these things and validate each other’s experiences and then figure out how to fight. There are going to be many fronts. There are going to be many ways that we have to approach this. After tonight’s meeting we’re going to focus our attention on a national day of action on February 19. We’re asking people to sign up to commit to wearing red, white, or blue, or a combination of the three to support federal workers and saving our services.

This is the time for an SOS. People need to understand that federal workers who are under attack right now represent something that has happened throughout history. Throughout all of human history, communities have formed to take care of each other, to provide mutual aid, to be supportive of the marginalized and those who need something from their fellow humans — which is all of us at some time or another.

A government is just a formalization of things that have been a thread throughout all of history. We, as government workers, are that service. We are the people who are out there putting into action the priorities of our communities to take care of each other, to love each other as humans, and respect each other and afford everyone basic human dignity. That’s something we can’t allow to disappear.

On this day of action, we’ll be showing up at Elon Musk’s places of business to make this point: You’re messing with our jobs. You’re messing with the ability of our communities to take care of each other. There are also going to be folks protesting or gathering, speaking their truth and their stories at federal workplaces, public plazas, and things like that. We’re going to show up and make our voices heard about this.

We’re asking everyone to plug into it. Sign up for that form so that we can keep you in the loop, so that we can keep communicating and building the network that we need to fight back against these unlawful and unaccountable people who are trying to take over our whole society.

This call extends beyond federal workers. This is a call to everyone — because this is an attack not just on federal workers but on our whole working class and on our whole society. The fight is existential right now. That’s why we’re sending this SOS. Community and solidarity are how we beat these tactics of fear and chaos.