Last week, I wrote about CUPE flight attendants’ illegal strike against Air Canada. The 3-day action succeeded in achieving a tentative agreement, but last weekend 99.1% of flight attendants voted to reject it. They are heading to federal mediation.¹ Unfortunately, federal mediation is no longer an option for American workers. The IAM tried it at Boeing before the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service was DOGEd.² Now, mediations are a “waste of time.”³

Contract talks breaking down isn’t even the worst thing that has happened to us this year. Two weeks ago, I discussed how Donald Trump’s administration has stripped IAM members of their union entirely. Now they don’t have any contracts at all. Eliminating unions at the VA affected more than 90,000 veterans employed there. Many of them were IAM members. On Labor Day, the historian Erik Loomis criticized the labor movement’s muted response to these attacks:

Mr. Trump and his administration have unilaterally stripped collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers. At the Department of Veterans Affairs alone, 400,000 workers, or 2.8 percent of America’s unionized workers, have lost their collective bargaining rights because of an executive order that will eventually affect more than one million federal workers. Mr. Trump ushered in Labor Day weekend on Thursday by continuing his assault on federal unions, adding the Patent Office, NASA and the National Weather Service to his list of targeted agencies.

Despite this assault on their very existence, we have barely heard a peep from unions. Where is organized labor in the public fight to maintain union jobs, stop the stripping of the safety net and lead the fight for democracy? Other than some statements and angry speeches, the movement has been muted.⁴

An IAM news release proved Loomis’ point yesterday. This was the IAM’s tepid response to the VA taking unions away from 90,000 veterans:

A letter from several unions to Secretary of Veterans Affairs Douglas Collins urges him to utilize a provision in a recent executive order that allows him to restore collective bargaining rights for VA employees by certifying that such actions are consistent with national security. The unions argue that the initial exclusion of VA employees was an overreach, that their work does not primarily involve national security, and that the loss of these rights has significantly contributed to staffing shortages and plummeting morale. [NFFE-IAM National President Randy] Erwin highlights the urgency of restoring these rights, with the union providing a deadline to Secretary Collins and underscoring the legal and ethical imperative to uphold employees’ First Amendment rights.⁵

This letter is probably sitting on Secretary Collins’ desk unopened. IAM leadership must follow in CUPE’s footsteps. Otherwise, their members will only continue to suffer under the Trump administration’s relentless assault on union rights. I maintain that strikes should be a last resort, especially illegal ones, but there are still plenty of ways to do direct action without going on strike. Direct action gets the goods, not strongly worded letters.

1. Isaac Phan Nay, “Air Canada Flight Attendants Vote No on Wage Offer,” The Tyee, September 9, 2025. ↩︎
2. Michael Sainato, “Doge shutters federal workplace mediator agency after Trump order,” The Guardian, March 26, 2025. ↩︎
3. James Drew, “Behind the scenes at Boeing mediation session union calls ‘waste of time’”, St Louis Business Journal, September 9, 2025. ↩︎
4. Erik Loomis, “Trump Is Wiping Out Unions. Why Are They So Quiet?” The New York Times guest essay, September 1, 2025. ↩︎
5. IAM, “We Aren’t Going Anywhere: Standing Strong for VA Worker Rights,” news release, September 11, 2025. ↩︎