Welcome back. I'm Ian Masters and this is Background Briefing, available 24-7 at

Backgroundbriefing.org. And joining us now is Eric Blank, who's a professor of Labor Studies

at Rutgers University, an organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee,

author of Red State Revolt, the Teachers Strike, Wave, and working class politics, and the director of

the Worker to Worker Collaborative.

His latest book is We Are the Union, how worker-to-worker organizing is revitalizing labor

and winning big.

And he has an article of the nation, if Trump crushes federal workers, we're all next.

Welcome to Background Briefing, Eric Blon.

Thanks for having me on the show.

Well, thanks for joining us.

And obviously, Trump is all about distraction,

you know, making an issue out of plastic straws, etc.

So what's going on with the purge of the US Civil Service

by Musk and his teenage techies? Because if you got rid of every government worker, that would only

be 1% of the US budget. And they're talking about

stripping trillions out of the US budget. So what's the game behind this distraction, do you

think, Eric? Yeah, I think it's a good point you make, which is that there's a lot of noise coming from the Trump administration, and it's important for progressives and organizers to understand the stakes of particularly urgent battles.

And I argue that the federal workers struggle right now against what Musk is doing and his coup

is the central fight in the U.S. at this point. And the reason for that is that in order to

assert their illegal authoritarian control over all branches of the government, the current administration needs

to break the back of federal workers unions.

...