Pearl River One of the reasons that Trump’s “flood the zone” tactics are so effective is that keeping up with this surge of executive orders and chaos forces an inadvertent level of triage. We focus on the big bombers, while a lot of smaller and equally dangerous drones slip behind our lines.
Take the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) as a good example. Well known within the ranks of labor and labor unions, FMCS is an independent, federal agency created as part of the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the notorious Taft-Hartley Act. The agency was sort of a small rose offered in exchange to a claw back of union rights and a concerted effort to regulate unions more aggressively. Congress by statute “mandated FMCS to resolve industrial conflict and promote labor-management peace and cooperation, minimizing the impact of these disputes on the free flow of commerce.”
Recently in another of Trump’s daily diet of executive orders he directed the agency to be shuttered and for DOGE to see to it. Despite the agency having been created by Congress, Trump papered over his unilateral action by saying words to the effect of “except as mandated by law.” In other words, maybe you could stop this is you sue, but meanwhile we’ll cut the agency. Does this save any real money? Not really. As the Guardian pointed out, it’s only “0.0014% of US budget,” despite saving half-a-billion dollars in preventing economic losses annually. FMCS hardly has more than 200 workers and most of them are mediators. A handful will be left once the reductions in force are completed. This won’t be the end of the world, but neither is it insignificant. FMCS carries a list of some 1000 arbitrators, for example. Almost all of our union contracts name FMCS as the source for mediators, if needed, and arbitrators, as required. The more expensive, and, frankly, less objective list for workers, the American Arbitration Association, will now be the only big source.
Was gutting FCMS really news in the United States. No, not really. There was no mention in the “news of the day,” as covered by the Times, Journal, or Post. I found a report in The Guardian, an English paper, but I had to search for it. I had gotten an email mentioning the order from an email listserv.
The attack on workers and their unions by the Trump administration has in essence become so common as to become trivial and mundane. The Trump administration is clear. It has no interest in labor peace, it wants control of labor, pure and simple. I’m not sure any union is going to the wall to save FMCS. It’s not a mortal blow, but yet another flesh wound, as Trump, Musk and their crew mouth platitudes about the value of labor, while doing everything they can to subdue workers and suppress their organizations.