'Like working in a prison': Employees at this agency reveal how Trump is 'gutting' it
"Cuts, fear and understaffing" is causing employee morale to plummet at the United States Department of Labor, according to a report by The Guardian.
About 20 percent of staff at the department have resigned or retired ahead of threatened, devastating cuts at the agency.
"Staff charged with protecting US workers feel their core mission is being undermined," and despite the fawning by labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who called President Donald Trump "the transformational president of the American worker," the irony has not gone unnoticed by agency workers.
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"Everyone thinks it’s a joke because it is a joke. There are parts of the building that have not been fixed. We have closed bathrooms all over the place. The front door doesn’t work, it’s been broken for two months, but we have money for a stupid banner,” one anonymous worker told The Guardian.
That banner is the giant one draped over the labor department featuring a massive picture of Trump with the words, "American Workers FIRST!"
"Fawning over the president, regardless of who the president is, acting that way means [Chavez-DeRemer] can’t give him hard or bad news and you should be able to do that if you’re a leader," said the anonymous staffer.
But it's the undermining of the agency's mission— to "foster and promote the welfare of job seekers, wage earners and retirees through drastic cuts, deregulations that include pay cuts for workers, and mistreatment of those employed at the agency," says The Guardian, that has the biggest impact.
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“They are gutting us. They are taking away everything that makes us helpful to the citizens of the states we work in,” another anonymous employee told The Guardian. “They say they’re changing things for the American worker. I was born in the US and am a veteran. I’m an American worker and they don’t care about us.”
Workers at the department are also being muzzled. Despite the National Labor Relations Act, which provides employees with a protected right to speak to the media about their working conditions and labor concerns, the labor secretary threatened workers with "serious legal consequences" if they did so.
“A federal worker shouldn’t be scared to speak the truth. For me to even be concerned about speaking is ridiculous, it’s how we stand up to protect ourselves and those around us,” said the second anonymous employee.
In response to workers' complaints about maintenance issues in the department's offices and bathrooms, a labor department spokesperson told The Guardian, "this fake news hit piece is exactly why public trust in the mainstream media is at historic lows."
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The workers beg to differ.
“It’s kind of like working in a prison,” said the second anonymous employee. “It’s very clear how they treat us is a bellwether for how they want other workers to be treated.”
Julie Su, who was labor secretary under President Joe Biden, agreed, saying this is far from a golden age for American workers as the administration promised.
“The Department of Labor is being deployed fully as one arm of this president’s war on workers, which is even more painful given that the mission of the Department of Labor is to protect workers. The way you treat your own workers is a sign of how you believe workers in general deserve to be treated. And this administration has taken a very destructive approach to its own workers," she said.
