Monday morning musings for workplace watchers
Senators Balk at Changes for Probies | Nurses on Strike Across the Country
Parker Purifoy: A dozen Senate Democrats are urging the Trump administration to cease its rollout of a new regulation that could narrow job protections for federal probationary employees.
The senators warned the change would remove merit-based protections for probationary workers, who are federal employees new to their job.
The proposed measure shifts adjudication for termination appeals from the Merit Systems Protection Board to an internal Office of Personnel Management process. It would also only allow appeals that allege discrimination on the basis of a worker’s political beliefs or marital status, or if the agency strayed from standard termination procedures.
The senators who signed on to the letter opposing the rule include Sens. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), Ed Markey (Mass.), Gary Peters (Mich.), and Michael Bennet (Colo.).
The proposed rule is only one of several aimed at altering the civil service. Others include the creation of a new employment classification that would remove civil service protections for thousands of career and policy-making positions, and a revision of standards for evaluating senior executive service candidates.
The changes come after thousands of probationary workers were fired last year as part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash the size of the federal workforce. A judge ruled those firings illegal, and some were brought back.
“Congress intentionally sought to prevent precisely the outcome where the agency that sets personnel policy also adjudicates claims that those policies are being applied incorrectly or unlawfully,” the senators said. “This proposed rule runs directly contrary to that framework, effectively recreating parts of a discredited system that Congress intentionally abandoned.”
Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that advocates for a well-functioning government, also opposed the rule in its comment, saying that OPM lacks the necessary independence to adjudicate the appeals.
“The proposed process would concentrate extraordinary discretion in the hands of the OPM director, who would be the sole official authorized to reopen appeal determinations,” it said. “This structure would introduce unnecessary administrative bottlenecks while further politicizing decisions.”
George Weykamp: Two nursing strikes on opposite ends of the country are exposing the realities of a health care system under pressure from federal cuts.
The strikes have led to roughly 46,000 nurses and other health care workers walking off the job in New York, California, and Hawaii. Workers are asking for higher staffing levels and improved health benefits that hospitals say they can’t afford.
The unions argue the hospital systems can afford to meet their demands. The United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals, which represents about 31,000 striking Kaiser Permanente workers, claims the hospital system employing their members is sitting on roughly $66 billion in reserves.
The hospitals contend they are offering generous wage increases. The unions say current salaries are noncompetitive, exacerbating staffing issues.
“People come in and it costs so much money to go train a nurse, but then that nurse gets trained and leaves within six months to a year because they can go down the street and make more money,” said Zachary Pritchett, an emergency department nurse at a Kaiser facility in Los Angeles and a member of the UNAC/UHCP bargaining team. “And then nurses have to take more patients, and patients are the ones that suffer.”
Labor costs were the largest expense category for hospitals in 2023, making up for about 46% of all expenditures, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The labor unrest comes at a time where the US health care system is reeling from a nearly $1 trillion cut to Medicaid as well as expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies which lapsed at the end of last year.
“The hospitals think that they can’t afford to meet any of these demands because of the anticipated financial challenges down the road, but they haven’t hit yet,” said Rebecca Givan, a labor relations professor at Rutgers University specializing in the health-care sector. “It’s easy for both sides to make arguments about what the impact of these changes might be, but the changes aren’t here yet.”
A spokesperson for Kaiser honed in on the point that the negotiations were coming at a time when millions of Americans were at risk of losing health-care coverage.
“This underscores our responsibility to deliver fair, competitive pay for employees while protecting access and affordability for our members. We’re doing both,” the spokesperson said.
We’re punching out. Daily Labor Report subscribers, please check in for updates during the week, and feel free to reach out to us.
To contact the reporters on this story:
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Learn more about Bloomberg Law or Log In to keep reading:
See Breaking News in Context
Bloomberg Law provides trusted coverage of current events enhanced with legal analysis.
Already a subscriber?
Log in to keep reading or access research tools and resources.