Question: When is a labor strike not a strike?

Answer: When it’s disguised as a federal government shutdown.

By definition, a strike occurs when employees collectively agree to stop working to gain a concession from an employer. This usually happens after contract negotiations have broken down. That’s not exactly what’s happening in Washington. To be fair, the shutdown lacks some basic ingredients of a labor strike — for one thing, federal workers remain on the job while their pay is being withheld until the shutdown is over; and, they never agreed to stop working or interrupt pay. These decisions were made for them.

But there is a framework. Most federal employees are not working; the rest are not getting paid. Their circumstance ratchets up pressure on President Donald Trump and Congress to break a 35-day logjam over government spending.

And there is this one massive similarity: organized labor is being used to exert the pressure on Trump to make concessions in his stand-off with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over funding for his security wall at the southern border.

It’s a twisted application of community organizer Saul Alinsky’s No. 1 rule of political power, which defines power as organized people and organized money. It’s twisted because the employees themselves don’t control the organizing. Federal unions are heavily regulated and forbidden from work stoppages. The regulations are imposed by Congress and the chief executive — the employer. That effectively turns the federal workers into pawns in this political chess game being played by their higher-ups.

The strategy is intentional. It’s also reminiscent of the air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981 — 38 years ago — when nearly 13,000 controllers walked out after contract talks broke down between the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) and the Federal Aviation Administration. Within days, President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 controllers, decertified PATCO and instituted a lifetime employment ban for the strikers from ever working for the FAA again.

Since then, regulations have only gotten harsher. Were they to strike today, federal employees could face prosecution and even jail time.

Meanwhile, a growing proportion of federal workers has been calling off sick rather than work without an immediate paycheck. The logic is that it’s better to take a temporary job with pay, like driving for Uber, than to work now and get paid later. Federal workers accumulate sick leave at a constant rate of four hours each biweekly pay period. With the shutdown about to enter its sixth week, even many long-time employees have exhausted their sick-leave benefit. So far this month, a reported 25,000 federal employees have applied for jobless benefits.

The pressure only grows as the resources dwindle. The Democrats wait for the eruption of a crisis that they can blame on the shutdown and, indirectly, on Trump. The Republican-controlled Senate on Thursday pushed twin votes on compromise budgets that would have broken the logjam. Both votes failed.

The developments only galvanize the central issue: Trump ran two years ago on a promise to build the border wall. He’s staking his political future on what he contends is a mandate to fulfill that promise, while Pelosi and the Democrats seem confident that Trump does not have a mandate.

What happens next might be anybody’s guess. Most likely it won’t be a strike — not a real, full-fledged strike, anyway.