Posts tagged Barack Obama
Judge Reinstates Labor Board Member Fired by Trump
March 7, 2025 // Judge Howell made a joke about the case’s possible trajectory, saying that she understood that “this court is merely a speed bump for you all to get to the Supreme Court.”
New documents show TSA screeners illegally unionized, pro-worker group says
February 11, 2025 // “During the Obama administration, the TSA administrator did an abrupt about-face, and TSA moved ahead with allowing screeners to unionize in violation of the law,” Dave Dorey, an attorney specializing in labor and employment law who represented AFFT, told the Washington Examiner. “Multiple administrators of TSA have stated publicly that TSA screeners are not covered by Title V, which includes significant rights for unionized workers — including the ability to file claims of unfair labor practices with an independent board and ultimately vindicate their rights in federal court. TSA screeners have none of these protections.”
Hawley Sells Moreno on Government Control of Private Contracts
February 7, 2025 // PunchbowlNews has reported that Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) is cosponsoring one of the bills based on Senator Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) recently released legislative framework implementing a “new direction” for Republican labor policy, which ironically appears to consist entirely of provisions stolen from Senator Bernie Sanders’ (D-VT) Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act (S 567, HR 20, 118th Congress) and Senator Markey’s bill that brings the warehouse sector under government control and creates a new subagency at the Department of Labor (Warehouse Worker Protection Act, S 5208, 118th Congress). The framework is expected to be broken down into five pieces, and Moreno is reportedly cosponsoring the legislation that would implement government control over management-union contract negotiations. The legislation, the Faster Labor Contracts Act, requires employers and unions to begin negotiating collective bargaining agreements within 10 days after a union wins a representation election and execute their agreement within months
Commentary: Who Is Big Labor, Anyway?
February 5, 2025 // If the Current American Plurality wants to hold together, it will need to find ways to support workers as a whole, not cheaply chase the union members that BLS and other data reveal to be unripe for recruitment by throwing more traditional members of the coalition under the bus. The Taft-Hartley Consensus approach to labor relations, which Republicans have advanced for 80 years, offers the opportunity for those workers who freely choose to organize unions to continue to do so while protecting the rights of workers who choose not to form unions or choose to work independently. It should not be cheaply abandoned in service to myths about whom the conservative movement is seeking to court.
Trump fires EEOC and labor board officials, setting up legal fight
January 29, 2025 // Due to existing vacancies, Wilcox's ouster leaves the board with just two members, short of the quorum it needs to adjudicate even routine cases. (The board, when fully staffed, has five members.) With this move, Trump has effectively shut down the NLRB's operations, leaving the workers it defends on their own, AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said in a statement.
Op-ed: Biden’s Last Labor Stand: Honoring the First Female Secretary of Labor While Propping Up His Failed One
December 17, 2024 // Biden even attempted to appoint a radical progressive incompetent to the post of United States Secretary of Labor and as much as bragged about this in this speech. What Biden failed to note is that Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su was never confirmed by the Senate, because she is that incompetent. Yet, Su was there anyway, praised and introduced by the first female president of the AFL-CIO, Liz Shuler, who credited Su with turning "the Department of Labor into a true House of Labor." A house of labor that has tacitly excluded and targeted the more than 64 million independent professionals and small businesses; but, apples and oranges.
Commentary: Biden Values Public Unions Above Public Service
December 12, 2024 // “It’s time for America to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again with people,” he said. “The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.” Yet it never happened. The White House issued various directives, and every political appointee I know was routinely in the office . But despite this widespread discontent among his own appointees, Biden never got the workers back. One reason is that civil servants overwhelmingly view the return-to-office push as a bad-faith political stunt designed to assuage critics in Congress or provide economic benefits to cities. The belief that regular presence in an office is beneficial, expressed by many managers in the private sector, doesn’t have much traction.
Amazon and Elon Musk’s SpaceX challenge labor agency’s constitutionality in federal court
November 20, 2024 // Attorneys for Amazon and Elon Musk’s SpaceX argued in a federal appeals court Monday that the National Labor Relations Board’s structure is unconstitutional, advancing a legal fight that may last into the Trump administration where Musk is expected to oversee bureaucratic cost-cutting. A panel of three judges at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans heard separate oral arguments in the SpaceX and Amazon lawsuits, which the two companies initiated after the labor agency filed complaints against them in disputes about workers’ rights and union organizing.
After Democrats lost the working class, union leaders say it’s time to ‘reconstruct the Democratic Party’
November 18, 2024 // “We can’t communicate with every nonunion laborer. We can only communicate with a portion of our members,” said Booker, who thinks Democrats could have performed better with a fierier populist message on the economy and a cooler one on cultural issues that make some of his members feel like Democrats are out-of-touch elitists. “A lot of our members own guns. A lot of our members hunt.” Booker said that when he toured job sites this year, he heard about inflation, immigration and the demise of the Keystone Pipeline, which would have created jobs for his members but was killed for environmental concerns — all issues that played to the GOP’s favor.
Commentary: What would a second Trump term mean for federal workers in D.C.?
November 5, 2024 // Trump’s campaign has pledged to relocate 100,000 federal jobs out of the D.C. region. Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service – a nonprofit organization that assesses federal government efficiency – says it’s hard to put a percentage on how likely that plan is, but there’s a “real risk.” Federal worker Marcus Glasgow says he feels a little anxiety every presidential election. And Trump isn’t the first presidential candidate to threaten to cut federal jobs. But this year, Glasgow’s “more anxious than normal.”