Summary
The Trump administration abruptly fired multiple National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) employees, then struggled to reinstate some due to a lack of updated contact information.
The NNSA, which oversees the U.S. nuclear stockpile, asked remaining employees to relay the message.
The terminations, part of mass federal layoffs orchestrated by Trump and Elon Musk, coincided with a Russian drone strike on Chernobyl, raising security concerns.
It would be absolutely hilarious if the workers took this opportunity to unionize and negotiate getting their jobs back with higher pay and better benefits.
Or unionize as consultants, at double the pay, plus benefits.
The two groups don’t often overlap. That’s like “flying as sharks”.
Consultants, by their nature, may have drastically-reduced job security, something people usually want from a union when they can’t get it from their government.
It’s context dependent. Some fields are inherently batch work. E.g. TV. In these cases, unions can allow contractors to set pay baselines etc, without a race to the bottom. Otherwise big companies can try and play us off against each other.
E.g. BECTU (uk tv union) organised a strike against a company last year, after they changed their invoice pay time to 3 months.
Not sure its unionizing - just charging the market rate for highly valued skills and knowledge. We should be infuriated as tax payers that we are going to end up paying more because of this debacle.
I thought the federal employees were unionized to some degree, but were still fired? I read something to that effect a week ago but the article didn’t go into much detail.
They’re unionized but lack the ability to strike.
And, yes, it does make the union largely useless. They can file lawsuits, and cite law, and involve themselves in employee arbitration, but that only matters when the opposition engages in good faith.