Government picks fight with its workers, our neighbors

Bill Knight column for 8-26, 27 or 28, 2019

“Trickle-down” is a phrase noted for its use in the disproven economic theory that enriching the wealthy eventually will help everyone else.

It also can be applied to decisions in Washington that can flow down to the local level like water. It’s easy to take federal workers for granted, reminding one of the lyric, “You don't miss the water 'til the well runs dry” that Harry Belafonte sang in “Crawdad Song.”

That’s true whether it’s President Trump shutting down government or attacking government unions.

Trump in July got the U.S. Court of Appeals in the D.C. Circuit to rule 3-0 that it lacked jurisdiction to block three White House executive orders affecting 2 million federal workers, union and non-union, restricting their rights on the job.

The orders limit subjects of bargaining, let bosses implement rules to fire workers fast and with little right of appeal, throw unions out of their cramped offices in federal buildings – where union reps meet with workers over grievances – and deprive them of phones, computers and even paper.

Changing past practice, Trump also requires union stewards to represent workers in grievances on their own time and at their own expense, prohibits workers from contacting Congress, and compels federal agencies to devise unfavorable contracts with unions.

Despite a lower court judge overturning the orders a year ago, the July decision essentially reinstates Trump’s decrees.

Elsewhere, the Trump administration this summer proposed a rule enabling federal workers to drop union membership – and opt out of paying membership dues – any time after their first year of membership. The new measure would allow supervisors to intimidate or threaten workers to resign from their union, or even refuse to join in the first place, unionists say.

Published in the Federal Register, the proposal follows “Janus v. AFSCME,” the 2018 Supreme Court decision that barred public sector unions from collecting “fair-share dues” from workers who are represented by the union, but who decline membership. The “Janus” suit was funded by Right-wing think tanks.

The proposed rule says it’s “consistent with ‘Janus’ [in that] upon receiving an employee’s request to revoke a previously authorized union dues assignment, an agency should process the request as soon as administratively feasible, if at least one year has passed since the employee initially authorized union-dues assignment from the employee’s pay.”

But the supposed effort to make labor law consistent throughout the public sector is obviously just union-busting.

 “The entire labor movement stands with our dedicated federal workers and will put our full strength behind fighting for the workplace protections all working people deserve,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. “Our voices will not be silenced by concerted union busting.”

J. David Cox, President of the American Federation of Government Employees – representing about 700,000 federal and District of Columbia government workers – said the change is “part of an all-out assault on federal employees’ collective bargaining rights.

“They are throwing out our contracts, enforcing illegal executive orders, and now trying to make it harder for workers to join and stay in the union,” he said. “Their ultimate goal is to destroy federal-sector unions, and we will do everything in our ability to prevent that from happening.

 “The union-busting framework laid out in the executive orders and actions already at the bargaining table demonstrate clearly there must be a check on the president’s power to destroy federal employees’ union rights,” he added.

Such dramatic changes in the terms of employment aren’t confined to Washington, national parks and federal lands, of course. For instance, downstate Illinois’ federal employees, unionized or not, work in:

The Department of Agriculture (Peoria’s “Ag lab”), USDA/Natural Resources & Conservation site in Havana, Coast Guard stations along the Illinois River, Department of Commerce offices, Customs & Border Protection, Federal Aviation Administration, air traffic controllers and TSA workers at airports, Federal Bureau of Investigation employees, Federal Correctional Institute workers (such as the Pekin prison), Federal courts’ staffers, the Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service, the Federal Public Defender offices, Food & Drug Administration locations, the Internal Revenue Service, Justice Department U.S. Attorneys and Marshall Service, Labor’s Wage & Hour Divisions, the National Labor Relations Board regional offices, Occupational Safety & Health Administration sites, Secret Service personnel, the Social Security Administration, and Veterans Administration facilities.

The appeals panel ruled that federal worker-management relations law requires federal employees to first take complaints to the Federal Labor Relations Authority (the U.S. government’s equivalent of the National Labor Relations Board). If they lost there, the unions could then go straight to appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court, the appeals-court judges said.

This latest “trickle-down” trick isn’t abstract or distant. The administration offensive on federal employees affects our neighbors and, ultimately, us.