Happy Labor Day!
This is a day to thank working people for their contributions to our society. It’s a day to thank unions for providing a path to the middle class to help those who need pensions, decent wages, and job security.
Trump is celebrating Labor Day by banning unions at several federal agencies.
President Trump on Thursday signed a new executive order targeting unions at more than half a dozen agencies, again under the auspices of national security.
The edict, which was published within minutes of Trump’s proclamation marking Monday’s Labor Day holiday, appends a March edict that seeks to outlaw collective bargaining for two-thirds of the federal workforce, citing a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act allowing the president to exclude agencies from federal labor law if the law “cannot be applied to that agency or subdivision in a manner consistent with national security requirements.”
Thursday’s order would ban collective bargaining at the International Trade Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office within the Commerce Department; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service and the National Weather Service; as well as NASA and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. It states that all these agencies “have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative or national security work.”
Matt Biggs, national president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, whose union represents a portion of NASA’s workforce along with the American Federation of Government Employees, suggested that the administration’s targeting of NASA—IFPTE’s largest union—was in retaliation for its own lawsuit challenging the Spring iteration of the executive order, filed last month.
“It’s not surprising, sadly,” Biggs said. “What is surprising is that on the eve of Labor Day weekend, when workers are to be celebrated, the Trump administration has doubled down on being the most anti-labor, anti-worker administration in U.S. history. We will continue to fight in the courts, on the Hill and at the grassroots levels against this.”