“President Donald Trump is trying to revoke collective bargaining rights from most federal employees — the latest move in his aggressive campaign to weaken the federal workforce.
Trump issued an executive order late Thursday night relying on a rarely used provision of the federal labor laws that authorizes the president to exclude agencies from long-standing unionization rights if he determines that those agencies are primarily engaged in national security work.
The order purports to end collective bargaining with federal unions at numerous federal agencies and subdivisions, including the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, State and Veterans Affairs, as well as the EPA and USAID. It also authorizes the Transportation secretary to exclude the Federal Aviation Administration and any other subdivision from labor rights.”
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“The order would eliminate collective bargaining rights from roughly 67 percent of the entire federal workforce, and for 75 percent of workers who are already in a union”
“Mass layoffs have begun, with most of the some 200,000 probationary employees expected to be terminated in the coming days, mostly from the departments of Energy and Veteran Affairs, but also some from the Small Business Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture (specifically the Forest Service), and—ironically—the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which has been overseeing the layoffs.
Probationary employees tend to be workers who have only been in their jobs for a year or under (or two years in some cases). They have the fewest job protections so they tend to be the easiest to fire.
“These firings are not about poor performance—there is no evidence these employees were anything but dedicated public servants,” said government employee union president Everett Kelley in a statement. “They are about gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.””
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“The OPM has apparently dispensed shifting guidance, reportedly telling agencies earlier this week that they should focus on terminating underperforming employees before later in the week shifting to a policy that all or most probationary employees should be dismissed.”
We should allow the skilled people that come over on H1-B visas to come and work, but we should also give them citizenship and the full labor rights of an American citizen so they cannot be exploited.
“Former President Donald Trump’s promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” would not only be a moral calamity requiring an enormous expansion of government—it would also be hugely expensive and ruinous to the American economy.
The governmental infrastructure required to arrest, process, and remove 13 million undocumented immigrants would cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and would deal a “devastating” hit to economic growth, according to a report published last week by the American Immigration Council (AIC). The think tank estimates that a mass deportation plan would shrink America’s gross domestic product by at least 4.2 percent, due to the loss of workers in industries already struggling to find enough labor.”
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“The costs of mass deportation would rebound into the economy in several ways. The economy would shrink and federal tax revenues would decline. The construction industry, where an estimated 14 percent of workers are undocumented migrants, would be particularly hard hit, but the effects would be felt throughout the economy.”
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“Immigration restrictionists often assume that deporting millions of undocumented workers would allow more Americans to fill those jobs, but the economy is not a zero-sum game. A shrinking economy would be bad news for many workers who aren’t directly impacted by Trump’s deportation plan.”
“For the 2023–24 school year, the average public school teacher salary was just under $70,000—well over the average for bachelor’s degree graduates ages 25 to 34 (though many teachers have master’s degrees).
West Virginia paid teachers the least, at around $52,000 per year, while California paid them the most, with an average salary of over $95,000. According to the National Education Association, teacher salaries top out at over $100,000 in 16.6 percent of districts. However, salaries have generally stagnated. From 2002 to 2020, inflation-adjusted teacher salaries declined by 0.6 percent while as per-pupil spending increased.
The reality is that teacher salaries vary widely between states and districts, especially when looking at pay adjusted for the cost of living, making it difficult to make generalizations. Adding to the murkiness, pay doesn’t seem to motivate teachers as much as many people think.
According to a December 2023 report from the National Center for Education Statistics, when public school teachers were asked why they decided to leave the profession, only 9.2 percent said it was because they needed higher pay.
A study from earlier this year also concluded that, among teachers who choose to leave their jobs, most don’t earn more in their new position.”
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“”The biggest relative growth has been in ‘instructional aids’ who assist teachers in the classroom. While teachers were 53.4 percent of all public school system employees in 1990, they were only 47.5 percent in 2022. Aides rose from 8.8 percent of employees to 13.3 percent. It’s not clear why this occurred, but it could be teachers asking for help, regulations requiring more services for kids, or lots of other possible factors.””
“Previous research on teacher strikes in Argentina, Canada, and Belgium, where work stoppages lasted much longer, found large negative effects on student achievement from teacher strikes. (In the Argentina study, the average student lost 88 school days.)
In contrast, the researchers find no evidence that US teacher strikes, which are much shorter, affected reading or math achievement for students in the year of the strike, or in the five years after. While US strikes lasting two or more weeks negatively affected math achievement in both the year of the strike and the year after, scores rebounded for students after that.
In fact, Lyon said they could not rule out that the brief teacher strikes actually boosted student learning over time, given the increased school spending associated with them. A recent influential meta-analysis on school finance found that increasing operational spending by $1,000 per student for four years helped student learning.
It’s possible higher wages could reduce teacher burnout, or the need to work second jobs, leading to improved performance in the classroom. Still, Lyon explained, it’s also possible that increased spending on teachers would not lead to higher student test scores, if wage gains went primarily to more experienced teachers, or to pensions, or if teachers were already maximizing their effort before the strike.”
“The rankings suggest that occupational licensing doesn’t follow common assumptions that red states are market-friendly and blue states are not. That may apply when it comes to taxes and other regulations, but licensing restrictions and reforms seem to cross partisan boundaries.”