Posts tagged Biden administration
Biden administration scrubs union accountability site
December 30, 2024 // “Federal union executives have taken advantage of the four years under the Biden administration, which adopted a ‘whole of government’ approach towards promoting and entrenching unions in the federal bureaucracy, to attempt to insulate themselves from a second Trump term,” Max Nelsen, a labor policy expert at the Freedom Foundation, told The Center Square. As The Center Square previously reported, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has for years updated a website to track union’s “official time.”
Key union vows to fight back after Trump says he would end remote work for federal employees
December 19, 2024 // Trump, who spoke to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, called the deal "very terrible" and said it's interfering with his plans for how to handle the federal workforce, which include ending remote work. He said he would seek to challenge the rule in court. "If people don't come back to work, come back into the office, they're going to be dismissed, and somebody in the Biden administration gave a five-year waiver of that, so that for five years people don’t have to come back into the office,” Trump said at his first post-election news conference.
OPINION: Restaurants get a preview of regulation under Trump
December 18, 2024 // Under McFerran’s leadership, the board also greatly altered the organizing process. Previously, employees had to request permission from the NLRB for a vote on unionizing. Now a shop is assumed to be unionized if a majority of the workers so much as express a preference for union representation. A vote is held only if the employer seeks it as a way of keeping the union out. And if the NLRB decides the business is trying to nudge workers toward a "No" vote, it can scrap the election and recognize the union with a vote never being held.
‘Time is running out.’ University unions rush to organize before the Trump White House
December 17, 2024 // Between 2012 and 2023, the number of unionized graduate student and postdoctoral workers more than doubled, from roughly 64,000 to 150,000. Faculty unions also increased by 7%, from 374,000 to 402,000, in the same period, the report said. Today, more than a third of graduate-student and postdoctoral workers are unionized while a quarter of faculty are. “Among faculty, the drive for unionization has been strongest among non-tenure track faculty,”
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.
Senate Democrats fail to secure NLRB majority under Trump in razor-thin vote
December 11, 2024 // A Democrat-led push to secure a majority on the National Labor Relations Board until 2026 fell short on Wednesday, as Senate Republicans and two independents blocked the nomination of Lauren McFerran to continue serving on the labor board.
Schumer moves to lock in place Democrat-majority labor board
December 11, 2024 // Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is attempting to ensure that the Democrats retain control of the National Labor Relations Board, the main federal labor law enforcement agency, until at least 2026 by extending the term of its current chairwoman, Lauren McFerran. A Senate floor vote on McFerran’s nomination is pending and, while it is possible that Senate Republicans could block it, it is not clear if enough will show up for the vote to do that. The vote may happen on Wednesday. This matters because the current board has been an aggressive advocate for unionization.
DOL heeds CEI’s advice on apprenticeship rule
December 10, 2024 // DOL seems to have been guided by whole-of-government directives as much as by its own statutory authority. Pages of the proposed rules pursued two objectives that the National Apprenticeship Act does not authorize: the promotion of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility and the imposition of demands on state agencies. The National Apprenticeship Act authorizes the secretary of labor “to cooperate with State agencies engaged in the formulation and promotion of standards of apprenticeship.” DOL apparently interpreted “cooperate with” to mean command.
There’s a huge pay raise on the way for clean energy workers
December 9, 2024 // To qualify, projects have to hire registered apprentices, who are paid for their work and earn credentials while doing it, and pay the prevailing wage to their workers, a level of minimum pay generally set for workers on government contracts. While prevailing wage has "long applied" to federal projects, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, this is the first time it's been applied to clean energy tax incentives.
Higher Ed Unionization Boomed Under Biden. Will That Change Under Trump?
December 8, 2024 // That National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions study noted that the ranks of union-represented grad workers especially grew in the past few years, increasing by 64,000 between 2021 and 2023. That was nearly triple the uptick over the previous eight years. And, according to National Labor Relations Board data released in October, the number of new undergraduate student unions representing housing and dining facility workers outpaced grad worker teaching and research assistant union formation since April 2023. But Donald Trump’s election and Republicans’ recapture of control of Congress could cast a pall over higher ed labor’s progress—or even undo it.