Posts tagged Interior Department
Opinion: REI is Right to Question Unions
November 17, 2023 // Following the landmark 2018 Janus decision, public sector unions can’t mandate dues on non-members because it violates their First Amendment rights. The Freedom Foundation reports four of the largest public sector unions have lost a whopping 733,745 members since June 2018. An inconvenient truth: The unionized workforce is rapidly dwindling, making up 10.1% of the U.S. workforce. In comparison, the freelance workforce has grown to 45%—with 72 million individuals engaging in independent contracting full-time, part-time, or occasional. Even if I disagree with their politics, companies like REI demonstrate they can offer better benefits and perks over third-party entities like unions.
BLM employees unionize amid change, uncertainty
October 12, 2022 // Hundreds of Bureau of Land Management staffers have voted to join the National Treasury Employees Union, partly in response to the Trump-era relocation of the bureau’s Washington headquarters and the movement of hundreds of D.C. jobs to the West. The decisions by about 200 non-supervisory headquarters employees in May, and another roughly 200 in the New Mexico state office in February and in the Taos and Rio Puerco field offices there last spring, were also spurred by the Biden administration’s efforts to undo the Trump BLM reorganization. They likely will not be the last bureau employees to join the union, NTEU President Tony Reardon said. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland,
Offshore wind boosted as Biden, East Coast governors team up
June 24, 2022 // A national agreement signed with North America’s Building Trades Unions covers contractors working on those projects and future ones, with no termination date on the project labor agreement. It sets the terms and conditions for union workers to build offshore wind farms, with targets to ensure a diverse workforce. It contains provisions for training to ensure they can construct the complex infrastructure, which costs billions of dollars. Vineyard Wind, South Fork Wind, David Hayes, Diane Hoskins, Heather Zichal, American Clean Power Association,
California tribal casino workers could be one step closer to unionizing under new ruling
May 23, 2022 // Although the tribe has rights as a sovereign government, “there is no sovereign immunity to arbitration because a party is only obligated to arbitrate when that party agreed to arbitrate, as Sycuan did” when it signed the TLRO, Judge Milan Smith said in the 3-0 ruling. He said all disputed issues, including the tribe’s claim that the agreement conflicts with federal labor law, must be referred to arbitration.
Biden task force releases report to strengthen labor unions
February 8, 2022 // “Today’s report from the White House task force is nothing more than pro-union propaganda and exemplifies how entrenched pro-union allies are in this administration," said Kristen Swearingen, chair of the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, which is composed of more than 500 business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Trucking Association.