 Local federal workers got a double hit of bad news this week. President Obama proposed a 1.6% pay increase for 2017, which fed unions said wasn’t nearly enough for workers hit by years of wage freezes and the Great Recession. Then came news that the chairman of the House Budget Committee wants to bust their unions. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga), yesterday introduced the Federal Employee Rights Act, denying federal employee unions the ability to automatically deduct dues from the paychecks of their members. “With the federal government already an open shop, stripping away the right of federal employees to have their union dues withheld from their paychecks is union busting on steroids,” said AFSCME Council 26 Executive Director Carl Goldman. “This bill aims to silence the already muted voice that federal employees have in the workplace,” said the American Federation of Government Employees. And DC Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton strongly condemned Price, noting that he “has managed to make an already discriminatory anti-labor bill worse by dragging in our local jurisdiction,” vowing she “will work hard to defeat this bill to not only protect federal employees’ rights, but also to defend the District’s right to home rule.”
PLUS: The Senate Has Plenty Of Racial Diversity, But Not The Kind You Brag About. The Huffington Post’s Dave Jamieson reports that “High-level Senate staffers are overwhelmingly white. Low-level service workers are overwhelmingly black and Latino.” Comments are closed.
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