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Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump takes ‘wrecking ball' to workers' rights amid global ‘freefall', new report says
Workers' rights across every continent in the world are in a 'freefall', according to the 2025 Global Rights Index released by the International Trade Union Confederation, the largest trade union federation in the world. The index noted workers' rights and democracy around the world are often under attack by 'far-right politicians and their unelected billionaire backers. Whether it's Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the US or Javier Milei and Eduardo Eurnekian in Argentina, we see the same playbook of unfairness and authoritarianism in action around the world.' In the US, the index cited 'the Donald Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the collective labour rights of workers and brought anti-union billionaires into the heart of policymaking'. Related: Trump's safety research cuts heighten workplace risks, federal workers warn These actions, according to the index, include stripping union protections from 47,000 workers at the Transportation Security Administration, attempting to revoke civil service protections for large swaths of federal employees and firing a member of the National Labor Relations Board, leaving it without a quorum. Luc Triangle, secretary general of the International Trade Union Confederation, said the report covers events up until March 2025, but these trends have continued to worsen in the US since then. The Trump administration has also drastically cut staff at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, fired a board member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority and issued an executive order revoking collective bargaining rights for the majority of federal employees. 'In more and more countries, we have elected leaders that once they are elected democratically, they are taking action against democratic values,' said Triangle. 'The first target of those leaders in many countries is they attack trade human rights and workers' rights, because we are the biggest defenders of democratic values and in that sense also their biggest opponents as largest social movement in the world.' Three out of five global regions saw conditions for workers' rights worsen, including the Americas and Europe hitting their worst scores on the index since it was established in 2014. Only seven out of 151 nations surveyed by the index had a top-tier rating on workers' rights, down from 18 in 2015. Workers' access to justice was restricted in 72% of nations surveyed, the worst on record, 87% of countries violated the right to strike and 80% violated the right to collective bargaining. The worst countries for workers, according to the report, are Bangladesh, Belarus, Ecuador, Egypt, Eswatini, Myanmar, Nigeria, the Philippines, Tunisia and Turkey. Only three countries, Australia, Mexico and Oman, saw their ratings improve from 2024. Triangle warned that the billionaire backers of these politicians have come out of the shadows and only expanded their wealth and control over important parts of society, in a 'coup' by billionaires of democratic institutions globally that are driving these deteriorating conditions for workers' rights. 'In the last four or five years with Covid and increased inflation, people lost purchasing power and that's the breeding ground for extremist parties to get voters to vote for extremist parties, which actually don't offer any solution for the working people,' said Triangle. The federation of unions is pushing a campaign for democracy that delivers in opposition to the framework model used by Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the US, and other billionaires and far-right political leaders around the world. 'The five richest people in the world more than doubled their wealth over the last five years, while 60% of the population of the world got poorer. We are investing nearly US$3tn as a world into arms and into weapons and there is unfair taxation. So if we want to find the money for delivering to working people to what they really need – good wages, more jobs, rights, social protections – it's a matter of political choice.'
American Military News
25-05-2025
- Politics
- American Military News
Supreme Court upholds for now Trump's firing of two independent agency officials
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld, for now, President Donald Trump's decision to fire two agency officials who had fixed terms that were set by Congress. By a 6-3 vote, the justices set aside rulings that would have reinstated Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board. Both were appointees of President Joe Biden. The decision is the latest in which the court's conservative majority sided with the president's power to fire agency officials in violation of long-standing laws. 'Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf,' the court said in an unsigned order. But the justices were quick to add the Federal Reserve Board is not affected by this decision. 'The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,' the court said. Trump has threatened to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose term extends to next year. At issue is a fundamental dispute over whether the Constitution gave the president or Congress the power to set the structure of the federal government. In 1935, the court ruled unanimously that Congress can create independent and 'nonpartisan' boards and commissions whose members are appointed by the president for a fixed term. The court then drew a distinction between 'purely executive officers' who were under the president's control and members of boards whose duties were more judicial or legislative. But in recent years, conservatives have questioned that precedent and argued that the president has the executive power to hire and fire all officials of the government. Shortly after taking office, Trump fired Wilcox and Harris even though their terms had not expired. They sued contending the firings were illegal and violated the law. They won before a federal judge and the U.S. court of appeals. Those judges cited the Supreme Court's 1935 decision that upheld Congress' authority to create independent boards whose members are appointed by the president to serve a fixed-term. Trump's lawyers say the Constitution gives the president full executive power, including control of agencies. And that in turns gives him the authority to fire officials who were appointed to a fixed term by another president, they said in Trump vs. Wilcox. Justice Elena Kagan filed an eight-page dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. 'Today's order favors the President over our precedent; and it does so unrestrained by the rules of briefing and argument — and the passage of time— needed to discipline our decision-making,' Kagan wrote. 'I would deny the President's application. I would do so based on the will of Congress, this Court's seminal decision approving independent agencies' for-cause protections, and the ensuing 90 years of this Nation's history.' The court said its decision was not final. The NLRB was created by Congress in 1935 as a semi-independent agency tasked with enforcing the labor laws. Its general counsel serves as a prosecutor while the board's five members act as judges who review administrative decisions arising from unfair-labor claims brought by unions. Under the law, the president appoints the general counsel who can be fired but board members have five-year terms. They may be fired for 'neglect of duty or malfeasance in office,' but not simply because of political disagreements. Trump could have controlled the board by appointing members to fill two vacancies. He chose instead to fire Wilcox, leaving the board without a quorum of three members. Wilcox argued there was no reason to rush to change the law. 'Over the past two centuries, Congress has embedded modest for-cause removal restrictions in the structure of numerous multi-member agencies,' she said in response to the administration's appeal. She noted that all past presidents — Republicans and Democrats — did not challenge those limits. The Merit System Protections Board was created by Congress in 1978 as a part of a civil service reform law. Its three board members have seven-year terms, and they review complaints from federal civil servants who allege they were fired for partisan or other inappropriate reasons. Trump's decision to fire Harris also left the board without a quorum. ©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
New York Times
25-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Why Is This Supreme Court Handing Trump More and More Power?
Since taking his second oath of office, President Trump has been on a firing spree. In violation of numerous laws or longstanding presidential practice (or both), he has ordered the removal of many high-level officials who normally retain their positions regardless of who is in the Oval Office. Some of these high-level officials have successfully challenged their removal in the lower courts. But on Thursday, in a case involving members of the National Labor Relations and Merit Systems Protection Boards, the Supreme Court quietly blessed some or all of these firings. In doing so, the court effectively allowed the president to neutralize some of the last remaining sites of independent expertise and authority inside the executive branch. The court sought to cast its intervention as temporary, procedural and grounded in considerations of stability, with the unsigned order noting concerns about the 'disruptive effect of the repeated removal and reinstatement of officers during the pendency of this litigation.' In truth, the decision was radical. Whatever one thinks about the underlying question of presidential authority, the court should not have disposed of the case this way. It effectively overruled an important and nearly century-old precedent central to the structure of the federal government without full briefing or argument. And it did so in a thinly reasoned, unsigned, two-page order handing the president underspecified but considerable new authority. Over the last four months, the legal world — and the country — has been plunged into chaos, and the Supreme Court bears a heavy dose of responsibility. Many of it decisions involving the presidency — including last year's on presidential immunity — have enabled the president to declare himself above the law. The court's latest order both enables the consolidation of additional power in the presidency and risks assimilating a 'move fast and break things' ethos into constitutional law. No modern president has ever come close to the large-scale personnel purges that we have seen under Mr. Trump, and for good reason: Many of the officials in question are protected by law from being fired at will by the president. Mr. Trump maintains that laws limiting the president's ability to fire high-level officials are unconstitutional. In making that argument, he is drawing on a series of recent Supreme Court opinions emphasizing the importance of presidential control over subordinate officials and invalidating removal limitations at agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But those recent decisions exist alongside another, older precedent, which until now has stood as a bulwark against any president's ability to lay waste to independent agencies: the Supreme Court's 1935 opinion in Humphrey's Executor v. United States. In that case, the court concluded that Congress could create expert agencies designed to enjoy a degree of independence from the president and could limit the president's ability to fire at will the leaders of such agencies. The court's recent unitary executive cases, with their expansive vision of presidential control, haven't formally overruled Humphrey's Executor. In fact, they stated explicitly that they were not 'revisit[ing] that case,' which involved an agency, the Federal Trade Commission, whose multi-member structure differed from the single-member leadership structure at issue in the court's recent cases. To be sure, the logic of the recent cases cast considerable doubt on Humphrey's Executor. But lower courts reviewing challenges to President Trump's firings have concluded that those firings are unlawful under existing precedent, applying Humphrey's Executor and leaving to the Supreme Court 'the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.' That's what happened in the challenges brought by Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board, two agencies that look a lot like the F.T.C. Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox prevailed in their cases before U.S. District Courts and then the full D.C. Circuit. But last week the Supreme Court 'stayed' those lower court rulings protecting Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox, and permitted their firings to stand while the litigation proceeded. The court provided scant reasoning for its decision, though it hastened to add that nothing it said should be taken to cast doubt on 'the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors or other members of the Federal Open Market Committee' — a nakedly policy-driven effort to head off the prospect of President Trump making good on threats to fire Jerome Powell, the Fed chair. To be clear, I am not a fan of unitary executive theory, or of its proponents' singular fixation on the president's power to fire — a power the Constitution doesn't expressly give the president and one that I don't think history supports. Even if you disagree — even if you think that Article II's grant of 'the executive power' to the president includes the power to fire at will any high-level official in the executive branch — the court's disposition of the case sends a profoundly dangerous message to the White House. In firing officials like Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox, the administration acted in flagrant violation of statutes and in direct defiance of the Supreme Court. Handing the president a win here suggests that the administration did not need to abide by Congress's statutes or the Supreme Court's rulings as it sought to change legal understandings. Given the range of high-stakes legal questions pending before the courts — on questions ranging from the due process rights of migrantsto the termination of federal funds to the firing of civil servants — this decision risks emboldening the administration further to act outside of our traditional constitutional order. And it did so during a week when the administration has accelerated its assault on both norms and law — criminally charging a member of Congress, accepting a luxury Qatari jet and defending the president's lavish investor dinner that would have been unthinkable under the ethics guidelines of previous presidential administrations. In the past four months, the lower courts have done more than other government entities to respond to the chaos emanating from the Trump administration. They have enforced constitutional guarantees, required compliance with statutes and insisted on the force of the decisions of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, by contrast, has undermined lower courts seeking to protect the rule of law and emboldened an administration eager to trample it. You can see why White House lawyers could feel encouraged to advise Mr. Trump of the correctness of a claim he was once mocked for making: 'I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.' The court may believe that it retains the ultimate authority to check presidential lawlessness, even as it signs off on the elimination of many other constraints on presidential power. The danger is that by the time the court actually tries to exercise that authority, it may be too late.
Bloomberg
23-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Whole Foods Union Certified by Labor Board First for Amazon's Grocer
A union has been certified at a Whole Foods Market store in Philadelphia, marking a US first for the Inc. grocery chain. The regional director of the National Labor Relations Board backed the union, overruling objections from Whole Foods, which, like other parts of Amazon, has campaigned against unionization among its staff. The decision tees up a legal battle.
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Supreme Court Ruled in Favor of Trump. And That Is OK.
It is a sign of the times that the Supreme Court may have just used its emergency docket to all but overrule an important precedent limiting executive power. That precedent is Humphrey's Executor, a New Deal-era case establishing the constitutionality of independent agencies. In a surprising twist, its decision to do so was both predictable and reasonable. The cases before the court were Trump v. Wilcox and Harris v. Bessent, which concern the president's power to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board without showing just cause to do so. Because these boards were created by Congress as independent agencies, the cases will ultimately test whether Congress can create such agencies, or whether the unitary executive theory instead requires them to be under complete presidential control. After lower courts held that the firings were unlawful and that the agency officials should retain (or regain) their offices, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of President Trump. We have plenty of things to worry about in constitutional law today. But those worried about how the court will confront the unprecedented and sometimes unlawful actions of the Trump administration should save their outrage for other cases. In the two cases here, the court held that the president was likely to prevail in his unitary executive claim, that the administration was unduly harmed by allowing the officials to keep their offices while the case was pending, and that this reasoning would not imperil the independence of the Federal Reserve. It did all of this in an emergency order, rather than waiting for the issues to arrive on the court's regular docket. All four of these things are noteworthy and provoked a powerful dissent by Justice Elena Kagan. But in this particular case, all four can be justified. First, the view of a majority of Supreme Court justices that independent agencies are likely unconstitutional is a straightforward application of its most recent precedents. In Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the court held that because the Constitution vests all of the executive power in a single person who is accountable to the whole nation — the president — and because it makes the president responsible for executing the laws, the president must have control over other officials who exercise executive power. In doing so, the court noted that past cases, such as the Humphrey's Executor precedent, had upheld the independence of multimember agencies that did not exercise significant executive power. But it strongly suggested that this exception was very small, and that it would be hard for modern agencies to qualify. Legal observers have long expected the court to follow this logic and overrule Humphrey's Executor sooner rather than later. Those who quarrel with this move (including Justice Kagan) disagree with the entire premise of Seila Law and the unitary executive theory. But there is not much new to see here. The court's view that agency officials should not keep their offices while the litigation is pending is also on strong precedential ground. Under the unitary executive premise, executive power is not theirs to exercise; it is on loan from the president. More important, even earlier cases that had departed from the unitary executive premise did not allow reinstatement as the remedy. One traditional remedy was back pay. A wrongly fired officer could sue for his salary — this is what happened in the Humphrey's Executor case. Other cases sought a remedy of blocking particular enforcement actions. But the precedent for judicially ordered reinstatement or retention is shaky at best. The court's declaration that the Federal Reserve is different also has a plausible basis. In the decades after the nation's founding, practice and precedent firmly established the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, which operated as a corporation with some independence from the president. This suggests that monetary policy is not necessarily executive power. While the Federal Reserve today does many things beyond its core mission of monetary policy, the court would have several options for preserving at least some independent functions for the Federal Reserve. Nor should we be too bothered that the court used the emergency docket in particular to issue such a major statement about independent agencies. Officially, the court was careful not to completely prejudge the legal issues, nor to state definitively that previous precedents about independent agencies would be narrowed or overruled. It made an honest judgment about the likelihood of success on the merits, as the law calls for. Even if it had gone further and made such definitive statements, this is not the kind of case where that should especially concern us. It is bad when the emergency docket forces the justices to quickly take positions on tough issues that they have not had time to consider carefully. But the unitary executive question has been before the court multiple times in recent cases, with extensive briefing and argument. All of the justices have thought carefully about the legal issues and made up their minds about most of them. The president's ruinous tariffs, purported cancellation of birthright citizenship, renditions to foreign prisons and retaliations against his political opponents all raise far graver constitutional problems than the court's ultimately unsurprising order in these cases. We should focus our concern there.
