Trump Stomps Workers - The American Prospect

[justaprogressive]

There’s no question that the events of the past week have seen some federal employees engage in activities that compromised national security. National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s discussion of an impending attack against Houthi forces in Yemen, and then real-time discussion of that attack as it unfolded, shared in a private chat outside official secured channels that for some bizarre reason included a journalist Waltz invited, doubtless confirmed the perceptions of America’s enemies and friends that President Trump’s national-security team is composed of dullards and doofuses who couldn’t defend America’s interests if their lives, and ours, depended on it—which, of course, they do.

On Thursday night, Trump did Waltz one better by saying he was moved to shore up national security by stripping collective-bargaining rights from perhaps one million federal employees, none of whom had anything to do with a security breach, much less one so appalling as Hegseth and Waltz’s.

Elections have consequences, of course, and as a result of the most recent one, we’ve gone from the most pro-union presidential administration in American history to the most anti-union one—at a time when unions’ approval rating of 71 percent dwarfs that of either party and of Donald Trump and Elon Musk as well. No American employer, public or private, has ever trashed so many duly agreed-to contracts as Trump just did, or destroyed the collective-bargaining rights of so many American workers.

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 codified in law much of the executive order first promulgated by President Kennedy in 1962, which gave federal employees collective-bargaining rights, though not including the right to strike or the right to bargain for wages, which were to be set by Congress. The 1978 law reinforced those rights and those exclusions, and gave presidents the power to exempt workers in national-security agencies from its provisions. Until Thursday night, those agencies were the CIA, the FBI, and kindred organizations—not the Food and Drug Administration, the Agriculture Department’s food safety inspectors, or the doctors, nurses, and orderlies in Veterans Health Administration hospitals, all of whom abruptly lost their right to bargain over working conditions and grievances due to Trump’s executive orders.

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-03-31-trump-stomps-workers/