Donald Trump: America’s Greatest Unionbuster

Donald Trump makes Jay Gould look like Walter Reuther. On a day that I already an opinion piece in the New York Times, I’m also all over this piece about that unionbusting fuck.

More than 445,000 federal employees saw their union protections disappear in August, as agencies moved to comply with an executive order President Trump signed earlier this year that called for ignoring collective bargaining contracts with nearly one million workers.

The termination of protections followed an Aug. 1 appeals court ruling on legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s directive. The order, signed in late March, directed 22 agencies to ignore contracts for employees in specific unions. Last Thursday, Mr. Trump signed a second executive order stripping union rights from thousands of other employees at six additional agencies.

Mr. Trump said that the affected workers had roles that touched on national security, and that provisions in their labor contracts could interfere with his policies being carried out. He cited, for example, the role that Department of Veterans Affairs employees play in providing care for wounded troops in wartime.

…

The legal battle over Mr. Trump’s orders has continued, in some cases holding up the termination of more union contracts.

If the administration prevails, it could mark the beginning of a broader erosion of collective bargaining rights, some analysts said.

“What this does is signal to private sector employers that they can go to war with the unions” and not face legal consequences, said Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island.

…

During his first term, Mr. Trump had a more moderate position on labor unions, Mr. Loomis said, and his labor secretaries operated within the standards of collective bargaining.

This time is different.

To strip collective bargaining rights from nearly half of the federal work force, Mr. Trump leaned on a provision in a 1978 law that gives the president the authority to exclude certain agencies or divisions from collective bargaining rights if there is “primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative or national security work.”

Mr. Loomis said that identifying national security as the primary function in some of the agencies targeted was spurious at best. But as a result, Mr. Trump’s directive applies far more broadly than previous orders.

In 1979, for example, President Jimmy Carter ordered employees in the Treasury Department’s office of intelligence support to be excluded from union rights. Mr. Trump’s order calls for the entire Treasury Department to be stripped of collective bargaining rights, with the exception of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

The decline of anything decent in this country sure provides me professional opportunities…….