Labor in Search of Strategies to Stop Assault on Federal Workers & Immigrants
Ousted NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo speaks out at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.
By Steve Wishnia
When National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo was fired on Jan. 27, she received an email on behalf of Donald Trump. It said he had no confidence she would faithfully execute his objectives.
That might be the only true thing he’s ever said, Abruzzo quipped Mar. 13 at “Workers Fight Back: The Federal Assault on Workers and the Movement to Resist and Organize,” a “workers’ rights convening” at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies sponsored by city Comptroller Brad Lander and the New York City Central Labor Council.
“This is the biggest threat to democracy and human rights in the history of our nation,” School of Labor Studies dean Gregory Mantsios told the forum.
So, “probably what you want to hear are strategies—what we can do now on the ground,” said Barbara Ingram-Edmonds, District Council 37’s director of strategic initiatives.
Michelle Crentsil, political director of the New York State Nurses Association, said the union is trying to “connect our political work with our collective-bargaining work.” That means getting the public on their side, she said, such as explaining how safe staffing levels ensure better care for patients. In 2023, when the union campaigned to have nurses’ salaries in New York City’s municipal hospitals raised on par with private hospitals, it was about ending the “two-tier system” discrepancy between the public and private systems.
Now, she said, with the contract covering 17,000 nurses in area private hospitals expiring on Dec. 31, they’re staring down the possibility that Medicaid might be cut by as much as $880 billion.
NYSNA political director Michelle Crentsil.
The two panel discussions focused on the Trump-Musk regime’s primary assaults on working people: the chainsaw amputation of public services and the workers who provide them, and their campaign to deport thousands of immigrants, the latest iteration of the get-those-vermin-out “dirty spalpeen” that has infested American history since “No Irish need apply” was appended to job ads 180-odd years ago.
Federal workers, said Christopher Dols of the Federal Unionists Network coalition, knew that when the Republicans came into power “it was going to be war”: Their agenda is about “gutting the services and making it hard to be a worker.”
Workers are starting from a bad spot in trying to protect their rights, he continued. They are not legally allowed to strike, a precedent harshly calcified in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 air-traffic controllers. The Federal Labor Relations Authority, the NLRB analog for protecting federal workers’ rights, has not had a general counsel in nine years, so “unfair-labor-practice challenges in the federal sector have been impossible to enforce.”
Still, Dols said, the workforce “is waking up.” An unprecedented coalition of the multiple unions representing federal workers is launching a “Let Us Work” campaign.
Winning means “fulfilling the oath that we all took to defend the public good,” he said. “They’re only overreaching if we make them pay the price.”
What’s next for the NLRB?
Trump will not be able to overturn major Biden-era NLRB precedents immediately, Abruzzo said, because he has not yet installed a Republican majority on the five-member board. Those include its Cemex decision, that employers have to either recognize a union by card check or request an election immediately, and its prohibiting captive-audience meetings, overbroad nondisclosure agreements, and employers making unilateral changes before a newly-recognized union has negotiated a first contract. But with much of its staff slashed, it will not be able to do very much to protect workers, she added.
“He feels he has absolute power,” Abruzzo said. The NLRB is a “quasi-judicial, not executive” agency, she explained, and “he wants to do away with their independence.”
Christopher Dols, head of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 98.
A federal judge in Washington on Mar. 5 ruled that Trump’s firing of board member Gwynne Wilcox, whose term does not expire until 2028, was unconstitutional. Without her, the NLRB would have only two active members, not enough to act on anything.
“The Framers made clear that no one in our system of government was meant to be king—the President included,” Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote.
The message firing Abruzzo and Wilcox claimed that Trump had the right to ignore the National Labor Relations Act’s provision that NLRB members can only be removed for “neglect of duty or malfeasance,” because it interfered with his power to fire federal officials without cause.
Immigration
The immigration panel emphasized educating people about their rights, building coalitions, and several more specific details. Leydis Muñoz of the National Domestic Workers Alliance cited know-your-rights teaching about “what to say, and especially what NOT to say” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Nathalia Varela, a Make the Road New York attorney, said that border czar Tom Homan had complained that such education had made it difficult to round up people in Chicago, the Trump regime’s first main target for mass deportations.
“Our workers are scared—but they’re fighting,” Varela said.
Adama Bah of Afrikana, a Harlem-based group assisting African immigrants, said that language access is a key issue: Information is often not available in African languages such as Bambara, Lingala, and Twi. There are also a few culturally specific issues. Street peddling is a common occupation for African immigrants, but Afrikana warns them not to sell counterfeit items such as fake Gucci bags, which is a felony under New York State law if their value exceeds $1,000.
Yesenia Mata, executive director of La Colmena, which works with low-wage immigrant workers on Staten Island’s north shore, says coalitions are essential. They have not received support from local elected officials, she said, and have been the target of hate such as having meetings disrupted and a phony volunteer with a swastika tattoo. Support from groups in the other boroughs has been crucial.
“These are grim times, but what they require is solidarity and resistance,” Lander said.