The Decline of the Federal Mediation Service

I added a couple of comments to this Boston Globe piece on Trump sending Big Balls and friends after the Federal Mediation Service, which helps strikes end. So now strikes are not ending and the government isn’t doing a very basic thing to help the economy run smoothly.

A strike by nurses and front-line workers at Butler Hospital is dragging into its seventh week, not just because union leaders and hospital executives are far apart on issues.

It’s also because of a little-known executive order signed by President Trump in March that gutted the agency overseeing federal mediators — people responsible for bringing companies and labor unions to the negotiating table.

Before the executive order, there were 143 federal mediators nationwide. After, only four were left.

“They shut down the regional offices where mediators knew the issues locally. That’s a real problem,’’ said Jesse Martin, executive vice president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) District 1199, the union that represents the striking workers.

Even when negotiators for the union and Butler executives make progress, follow-up meetings are delayed because a federal mediator is not available. The delays are costly to both sides: As workers remain on strike, they go without pay and benefits, including health insurance, which hospital executives cut off in May. Meanwhile, Care New England, the health care system that owns Butler Hospital, is shelling out millions of dollars for contract workers to temporarily replace those on strike.

Federal mediators are brought in when unions and management can no longer productively communicate with one another.

“The fact that the federal administration has now not quite eliminated but gutted it, is terrible for labor relations and, ultimately, it’s trouble for the economy,’’ said Eve Weinbaum, a sociology and labor studies professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Labor Center.

“There are mediators who deal with thousands and thousands of situations every single year where management or labor or both call in an outside expert to help resolve a dispute,’’ Weinbaum added. “And I don’t understand why the federal government wouldn’t want to make that continue.’’

…

But with the dramatic decrease in the number of federal mediators, some experts say more strikes and other collective actions could take place because contract negotiations hit a standstill or because of the lack of a neutral party in the middle.

“It’s possible that you see more extreme actions by unions,’’ said Erik Loomis, a professor of labor and environmental history at the University of Rhode Island.

The cuts come as many workers around the region are bracing for potential strikes.

On June 13, workers at Fenway Park who work for Aramark, the food service and facilities provider, in Boston authorized a strike in an effort to seek better pay and limits on automation, including beer kiosks and self-checkouts. The strike could begin at any time.

Last Monday, workers at Rhode Island Hospital, the state’s only Level I Trauma Center, and Hasbro Children’s Hospital, the state’s only pediatric care hospital, voted to authorize a strike. Both hospitals are run by Brown University Health, formerly known as Lifespan Corp. In order to avoid delays caused by the lack of federal mediators, the hospitals’ executives opted to use a retired federal mediator that they already had a relationship with to help with contract negotiations, said Brown University Health spokesperson Jessica A. Wharton.

Private mediators and arbitrators can be brought in by companies and labor. But, Weinbaum said, that’s uncommon.

“It’s hard to find them,’’ said Weinbaum. “It’s also hard for both sides to know that the person is objective and reliable. That’s why a federal organization exists.’’

This is just Trumpism as its stupidest. It doesn’t even per se help the employer, as I tried to state in that one quote (really it feels out of context with what I was trying to get at, but you can’t help what lines reporters will actually use and I don’t really think unions are going to have a new radical edge because of all this). Its just the enshittification of labor disputes. Fun times,.