The longest government shutdown in United States history came to a temporary end Friday after President Donald Trump signed a bill to reopen the government for three weeks. Negotiations over security on the US-Mexico border are expected to continue despite Trump’s failure to reach a deal with Democrats during the more than one-month-long shutdown.
Many are crediting the shutdown’s end to Senate Democrats, in particular, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for repeatedly refusing to agree to negotiations with Trump to fund his border wall. Her refusal to back down to Trump is commendable considering so few Democrats have flat out refused to compromise with him in the way Pelosi did.
Still, the true winner of the government shutdown isn’t Trump, or Pelosi, or any politician at all. Credit for ending the shutdown should go to the 800,000 workers who went weeks without pay, and whose lives were disrupted by a petty political power play. The true winners are those workers whose threat of a strike so threatened Trump’s government that within the span of 24 hours, Trump conceded defeat.
The effects of the shutdown started to take a dangerous turn at airports around the country this past week. Many TSA workers, after weeks of not being paid, refused to show up for work, leaving airports with 10 percent fewer workers than normal to check passengers’ baggage.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, Sara Nelson, gave a speech urging her fellow airline workers and all workers affected by the shutdown to speak with their unions and organize a strike to end the stalemate.
The final straw seemed to come Friday morning, when the Federal Aviation Administration halted several incoming flights to LaGuardia Airport in New York due to a shortage of air traffic control workers. That afternoon, Nelson released a video on Twitter reiterating that her fellow flight attendants should strike.
Fewer than 24 hours after flights were halted at LaGuardia, Trump agreed to temporarily reopen the government. The hundreds of thousands of unpaid, yet vital, federal workers and the threat of a massive wildcat strike pushed Trump over the edge.
It was not Pelosi’s defiance — she held the same position throughout the entire shutdown — that finally got to Trump. It was the turmoil caused by furloughed workers forced not to work. And it was the fear that unpaid federal employees would take to the streets and further upend the government.
Though the government shutdown has been temporarily suspended, government workers will continue to feel the negative effects of those five weeks.
There are already fears that some TSA workers may not return to their jobs. TSA workers are right to fear for their jobs considering they went through so much stress over Trump’s obsession with imaginary immigrants “flooding” the southern border.
The shutdown has forced people across the country to work without pay or potentially get fired. Now the government is promising to give workers their back pay, but the return to normalcy will be slow. In the meantime, workers’ expenses will continue to pile up.
It is also unclear whether this is the end of the shutdown, or if in three weeks time our government will come grinding to a screeching halt yet again. Trump said he will consider declaring a national emergency if he cannot reach a decision with Democrats on the border wall.
The disrespect and disregard the government showed its workers is certain to cause a stain in these workers’ minds. If this incites workers to strike in the coming days or weeks, I will stand in solidarity with them. Throughout history, workers’ strikes have had powerful effects on governments and led to huge changes in society.
Most recently, we have seen how the “yellow vests” movement in France has crippled President Emmanuel Macron’s already unpopular government, and all of his attempts to reach a compromise thus far have been rejected by workers who continue to protest for even better wages and lower fuel taxes.
Perhaps it’s time American workers stage a protest of this sort. After all, if the longest shutdown in American history was ended in the course of a day after even just the threat of a strike, imagine how a real strike would get Trump to crumble at the American people’s feet.
