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The federal workforce, as a share of the total U.S. population, has shrunk since 1982. In October 1982, there were 2.890 million federal workers. Forty-two years later, in October 2024, that figure totaled 3.001 million, a miserly increase of less than four percent. During that same period, the total U.S. population increased over 104 million, or about forty-five percent. Total local government employment grew from 9.430 million to 14.940 million over those forty-two years, an increase of nearly five million, while state government employment grew from 3.636 million to 5.514 million, an increase of about 1.9 million. Thus, state and local government employment basically kept up with forty-five percent population growth over those years, while federal employment barely grew at all.
Obama embraced the language of austerity in November 2010, when he froze federal pay for two years, announcing, “Just as families and businesses around the nation have tightened their belts so must their government.” This analysis is wrong; a nation is not constrained to operate as a family or business does and cut in difficult times. In fact, economists now acknowledge that federal spending was too small coming out of the Great Recession. If Obama had had greater respect for federal workers as a constituency of the Democratic Party, he could have bent over backward to justify increasing federal pay as a pro-stimulus measure, as Republicans quicky embrace cutting taxes on businesses to fight recessions.
Without a union or labor consciousness from society, federal workers are walking into a Kafkaesque nightmare of unclear policies and pretend standards in a second Trump administration.
After three-and-a-half decades of these arbitrary raises, federal worker pay is 24.72% behind what it is for comparable private-sector workers, according to a report from the Federal Salary Council, which uses BLS survey data to generate comprehensive comparison statistics.
Federal government workers are nothing like the overpaid and too-numerous lot that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and their attendant DOGE commission, say they are. In fact, federal workers have perhaps been among the groups of workers who’ve been least successful at advancing their interests over the past 40 years.
Unlike state government workers and national civil servants in other countries, federal workers lack the ability to fight back through strikes. The Chicago Teachers Union strikes of 2012 showed that local government workers can challenge even Democratic politicians like Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayor who backed neoliberal privatization efforts aimed at marginalizing public school teachers. These strikes sparked similar efforts in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, and laid the groundwork for political efforts that are still paying off. Brandon Johnson, a key organizer of those strikes, is now Chicago’s mayor. ()
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The reality of how federal workers are and have been treated should be a focal point for a defeated and disorganized left, whether among the moderates blaming the far left or among those who agree with Bernie Sanders that party leadership has lost touch with workers. The fight for federal workers is the first battle in the upcoming assault on the federal government. The left would be wise to use a full-throated defense of federal workers an opportunity to portray Donald Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy and the entire GOP as cruel and unconcerned with actual working people.
A Democratic Party interested in workers should find it very easy and intuitive to fight against Musk and Ramaswamy on this issue. Musk has repeatedly tweeted variations of himself asking people, in the context of federal workers, “So… What would you say you do here?” a reference to “Office Space” that, given the storyline in that movie, implies the answer is “nothing” or “very little.” He treats his own workers with the same arrogance and dismissiveness. In 2022, while we were still recovering from the pandemic, Musk imperiously announced that telework wouldn’t be available any longer for Telsa workers and charged that those who wanted to telework should “pretend to work somewhere else.”
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The treatment of federal workers is the moral choice and responsibility of the citizenry en toto, and there’s nothing that says we must lower ourselves to the moral level of an Elon Musk, nothing that says we have to accept language like “little jobs” to describe all that federal workers do. Resisting the DOGE commission must be the next step in Democrats showing they’re a workers’ party, like they say they are.
Obama additionally introduced an element of generational warfare in the federal service when, as part of two budget compromises with Republicans, he twice increased the required pension contributions of newer federal employees. All told this means that, while federal workers who started before 2013 pay 0.8 percent of their salary towards funding their pensions, employees hired in 2014 or later pay over five times that amount. This is a terrible idea for worker solidarity; newer workers may direct their frustrations at those paid more simply for having started earlier. It also reinforces the idea that boomers and other generations simply “pull up the ladder” on later generations rather than fighting for all workers.
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