WASHINGTON—There’s another big reason, left unmentioned until near the end of a mass rally of unionists in D.C. on Wednesday to push senators to undo right-wing GOP President Donald Trump’s wreckage of union contracts covering 1.5 million workers.
What Trump did to them, especially to their constitutional rights to free speech and their legal right to organize, he could do to you.
That’s what Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, a Machinists sector, said at the January 14 Capitol Hill rally to urge workers and the country to lobby for Senate passage of the Protect America’s Workforce Act (PAWA).
After a long and successful AFL-CIO-led campaign, the Republican-run House passed PAWA in December after unions led a mass mobilization nationwide. It pressured enough Republicans there to defy party leaders and join all the Democrats and vote for it. Now the federation has turned to the Senate, with a toll-free number 844-994-4554 for people to call to lobby their senators.
But that wasn’t Erwin’s sole top reason PAWA should pass. The U.S. Constitution’s survival is.
“We are in a dangerous place if the president thinks it is at his discretion to decide what rights Americans have–and what rights they do not,” the NFFE leader warned.
“The right to bargain is a 1st Amendment constitutional right,” and Trump and his Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, a notorious opponent of bargaining rights for federal workers, took it away.
“Where will it all end?” Irwin asked the crowd of hundreds of unionists and their supporters. “What are we left with? Temporary, conditional privileges?”
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to let one man take away rights,” not just from federal workers, but from every family, child, and grandchild in the U.S., he declared.
Erwin urged the crowd, as they talked with senators and got other people to talk with senators, to raise the constitutional issue, as well as the practical effects of Trump and Vought stripping 1.5 million people of the protection of union contracts.
“This is a constitutional issue to protect America from unlawful infringements on our rights,” he stated. “It is a matter of the president targeting people he doesn’t like because he thinks he can. But he can’t. Senators, you have to protect the American people from crap like that…What do we say? ‘Hell, no!”
Current events, in addition to the contract terminations and later mass firings Trump and Vought undertook, bear Erwin’s words out. From coast to coast, Trump’s thuggish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents zealously and gleefully round up, beat up, tear gas, pepper spray, and fire rubber bullets and flash grenades at anyone they wish, migrant or not, citizen or not.
Thousands have been rounded up and deported, including to countries they fled from in fear or to U.S. “allies” with hellhole prisons, such as El Salvador. At least 25 people have been killed, including observers such as Minneapolis activist and peaceful SUV driver Renee Good, 37.
But Trump’s agents have also kidnapped, rounded up, interned, and deported—or tried to deport—people who publicly disagree with him. Dissenters challenge his enormous support for the Israeli massacre of Gazans, his stifling of scientific dissent and research, his refusal to accept facts, and his continued ranting about his 2020 election loss, among other issues.
The federal workers have had their rights to union contracts, constitutional protections, and bars against summary judgments and firings taken away. PAWA would give them back, and the other speakers at the rally said the U.S. as a whole would benefit.
Without the protection of a union contract, a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) nurse is overstressed, overworked, and can’t be as effective a patient advocate as she wants to be, says Irma Westmoreland of National Nurses United’s VA chapter.
Besides, Trump’s VA fired 30,000 workers last year, and he wants to let another 10,000 go.
Without the protection of a union contract, Trump’s Housing and Urban Development Department Secretary fired one worker who blew the whistle on HUD’s civil rights office for not enforcing fair and open housing laws.
The office isn’t cracking down on banks and developers “who deny people loans” and housing “based on the color of their skin,” says Paul Osadebe, of HUD’s Government Employees (AFGE) local. “They outright fired one of my co-workers, and they attempted to fire me.
“They don’t want you to fight back against mass layoffs…But I could speak out because I knew my union had my back.”
Without protection of a union contract, the Social Security Administration closed field offices and cut staff, thus delaying or barring face-to-face interviews that clients seek to discuss disability claims or even just to change their contact information, says retired field staff local President Witold Skwierczynski.
And without a union contract’s protection, NASA auditor Monica Gorman is still, somehow, resisting pressure from agency colleagues working on expensive projects—such as planned missions to the Moon and Mars—to shave cost estimates when she knows she can’t.
“I can be an independent voice when I know I’m safe from retribution” for speaking the truth, says Gorman, of the Professional and Technical Engineers. “If I were going to send astronauts on a mission to Mars, I’d want to know they’d be safe” because everything has been checked beforehand —and no corners have been cut.
All that and more is a big reason the four, plus Erwin, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. were among a parade of speakers before a large rally of present, former, fired and retired federal workers, plus allies from more than a dozen unions, to urge Senate approval of the Protect America’s Workforce Act, S2837, to restore their union contracts.
The House passed PAWA, after massive union lobbying, in mid-December, overcoming a GOP leadership blockade and Trump’s opposition. But it needs 60 of the 100 senators to vote “yes.”
Right now, with Republicans holding 53 seats, PAWA supporters have 49 votes: All 45 Democrats, both independents, and Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—a unionist-heavy state—and Susan Collins of Maine. PAWA backers need 11 more. Erwin, in an interview afterwards, said there are some persuadable Republicans, while others hope the federal courts will let them sidestep the issue.
That Senate battle prompted speakers to urge the crowd, and the rest of the country, to lobby the lawmakers. The day before the rally, the workers got another win under their belts, and it’s relevant to every worker in the U.S.
As part of the carnage, Trump and Vought fired 870 workers at the National Institutes of Occupational Safety and Health, a research arm that provides disease and injury data and analysis for federal job safety and health agencies.
One speaker, amid the urgings, got up and said that every single one of them received e-mails on January 13 calling them back to work.
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