Rumsfeld Assault on Pentagon Workers Rights Rejected By Federal Judge
Rumsfeld Assault on Pentagon Workers Rights Rejected By Federal Judge
Donald Rumsfeld has been leading an effort to “reform” the Defense Department’s personnel system. On June 4, 2003, he testified to the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs that the new system would preserve bargaining rights for Pentagon employees:
[T]he National Security Personnel System we are proposing…will not end collective bargaining. … To the contrary, the right of defense employees to bargain collectively would be continued. What it would do is bring collective bargaining to the national level so that the Department could negotiate with national unions instead of dealing with more than 1,300 different union locals, a process that is inefficient.
Unfortunately for Rumsfeld, the Homeland Security Department had already tried this scheme and been rejected. The judge in that case batted down the argument that government agencies can strip away bargaining rights in the interest of “flexibility”:
Congress made protection of the right to bargain collectively an independent statutory requirement. It did not give the Agencies discretion to sacrifice collective bargaining in the interests of flexibility, any more than it authorized them to rely upon “flexibility” to waive merit system principles or other rights.
Today, U.S. District Court Judge Emmett G. Sullivan agreed with the reasoning in the Homeland Security Department case. He rejected the argument made by Rumsfeld in 2003, finding that the new Pentagon personnel system violates the law:
[A]s was the case in Chertoff I, this Court concludes that…the new rule fails to ensure even minimal collective bargaining rights.
It’s a big victory for the 700,000 Pentagon employees working to defend our country, who deserve better than to have their own Defense Secretary trying to strip away their rights.
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Remember Jill Carroll? Apparently not, since not one place, out of the countless blogs to which I’d gone yesterday, had even mentioned her. Why was yesterday so important? Because her kidnapper’s latest deadline ended yesterday and we still have no word on her fate. If you major bloggers, you John Aravosis, you Jane Hamsher, you Atrios, you Kos or anyone else who has the power to mobilize as we did just before the Alito cloture vote reads this, then please click on this link and read my impassioned plea to start mobilizing and talking to the State Department about getting Jill safely released. Please read this post, as it is likely the best and most impassioned blog entry I’ve ever written (and passion is not something in which I notable lack). I don’t have the juice to jam emails inboxes or fax machines but several of us do, and this is aimed specifically at the Hamshers, the Aravosis’s, the Kos’s, the Amatos and the Atrios’s. Thank you.
February 27th, 2006 at 7:51 pmPork,
I understand your plea, but is disingenuous in that if you are truly concerned about the well being and safety of innocent american bystanders, then what about all of the innocent Iraqis? Or the folks who have been rendered? Or the ones who are held illegally in Gitmo and the other secret prisons?
I truly hope that Ms. Carroll gets out alive. But I also hope that our troops get out alive, and that Iraqis are allowed to achieve peace, and the kidnapped foreigners that are being detained by the US are released, and that the perpetrators of this heinous and illegal action that we call the Iraq War are penalized for the 100,000’s of deaths and injuries that they have caused.
This is where your focus should be, if you are truly basing your plea on what is right for humanity.
February 27th, 2006 at 8:09 pmSo the judge decided that the employees working for the Pentagon deserve to keep collective baragaining. Too bad that most of the government employees vote Republicans and will never give the Democrats any credit for their labor rights.
February 27th, 2006 at 8:16 pmSomeone should tell Sec. Rumsfeld that you go to work with the personnel system you have, not the one you wish you had.
February 27th, 2006 at 8:17 pmworking to defend our country
nice literary touch
February 27th, 2006 at 8:19 pmRummy’s doing his Python Holy Grail rabbit imitation again –
Those unions got “huge nasty teeth†(Just wish it were true)
February 27th, 2006 at 8:25 pmRumsfeld should be forced to resign because of his criminal acts regarding the Iraq occupation and authorizing torture! He really should be prosecuted and imprisoned for everything he has done!
February 27th, 2006 at 8:37 pmIt’s so hard to work for someone who has met his Peter Principle.
February 27th, 2006 at 8:37 pmHey jurrasicpork,
The liberals are the bleeding hearts. Remember? So, is the Republican party a kinder gentler war machine now. Nice way to try and drive the thread off topic.
If you want to know what is going on with Jill Caroll, go to any main stream media site.
Here, from the front page of CNN:
CNN
February 27, 2006
Khalilzad: Iraqis say Carroll alive
You see, here we discuss importnat topics that aren’t covered by the MSM. Jill Caroll is just another “missing white girl” story. Sorry, but that is true. She shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
February 27th, 2006 at 8:38 pmThat rummy is sumthin’ else. greedy lil fingers just a wrigglin, all excited like, manic, devious. lil beedy eyes, slickish hair, smarmy answers, deciet, scheming, loathsome.
yupp its official.
February 27th, 2006 at 8:45 pmthe guys creepy
As long as Rummy has his. He is the wealthiest member of Bush’s cabinet.
February 27th, 2006 at 9:48 pmOne little secret about saving the union jobs of the pentagon civilian workforce is the privatising of their jobs to contractors.
Want an example? The military ID card program. That has been privatised. How do I know you ask?
Well when my daughter went to Ft. Knox KY, she had a private contractor provide her active duty ID card for her to deploy to Iraq.
So Donald Rumsfeld has the US military ID cards placed in a private corporations hands, not the US Militaries.
And just for your information a US Military ID card is accepted as a passport in many countries around the world, and provides open access to all military bases, I should know I still have one for some of my medical care, and PX and Commisary priviledges.
The card does not get you into any restricted areas unless you are on the access roster, but you can get to the front door.
It is not just the ports we need to worry about, this group of privatise this outsource that wll give anything away to help their campaign contributors make an easy buck off the taxpayers of this country.
RANT OFF
February 27th, 2006 at 9:53 pmBad enough that the Pentagon got hit on 9/11. Rumsfeld now thinks the people who work there are worth anything?
Rumsfeld is worth nothing but shit.
February 27th, 2006 at 11:49 pm#12 That implies security problems too. That private company has a Data Base somewhere with the 700.000 Pentagon workers data. They know every soldier, special ops and CIA agents with military acreditation in the world. Too much concern for a private company?
February 28th, 2006 at 6:48 amTo all you Teamsters, and Buildings and Trades union traitors who broke away from the AFL-CIO at a time when the criminal Bushite junta and their ignorant poor/middle working class sycophants and worshippers are perpetrating an all out frontal assault against unions…
…take a good, long, hard look at what you’ve done to your collective bargaining power…
…you’ve diluted it, diminished it, destroyed it at EXACTLY the wrong time…
…reconcile your differences, and change the AFL-CIO national leadership from within…
…STOP BEING STUPID…
…and for God’s sake (and the sake of the poor/middle working class unionists who believe in the power of collective bargaining) STOP VOTING REPUBLISCUM!!!!!
February 28th, 2006 at 8:50 amRight on Big Papa
February 28th, 2006 at 11:44 pmIt seems the Marines in Iraq have had their email privileges and some Internet sites blocked out – sites which are unpatriotic, subversive, left-wing…(Marine Corp brass or whoever wasn’t very specific.) Now the Pentagon is punishing its civilian workers. My lord, this administration is at war with everybody. I wonder if people are packing in the White House corridors.
March 1st, 2006 at 2:06 pmtest
March 25th, 2006 at 3:11 pmRumsfeld going home
Many greetings from Teeladen in Einbeck, Germany
December 17th, 2006 at 7:56 am