00:00All right. Questions. Yeah. Thank you so much, Senator. I'm from Parkersburg, West Virginia. I'm a federal employee. I'm a chief steward for the National Treasury Employees Union. You were. I was. We have lost our collective bargaining rights because of a bogus executive order from March that violates statutory law.
00:21The courts are failing us. The courts will probably continue to fail us with the Roberts Court. So we need Congress to act to restore our collective bargaining rights and our union contracts. And federal employees have been through hell for seven months. We need Congress to care about that. Our representatives don't. And so we need folks like you to care about that. And while I'm here as a union steward, I want to thank all of you from the UMWA who.
00:51I'll just say the labor history down here shows how you deal with the billionaire class. Thank you.
01:01All right. What the gentleman is talking about.
01:06And he's raised the whole broad question.
01:11Musk contributes 270 million to Trump's campaign. Trump wins.
01:16Musk becomes the most important person in government.
01:18And he goes all over the place, cutting back.
01:21They threatened to cut back 80,000 employees at the Veterans Administration.
01:29Well, pressure.
01:30We put pressure on them.
01:32Now I think they're down to 30,000, which is also a disaster.
01:36All right.
01:36They went after federal employees.
01:38Workers in America, the last that I heard,
01:42have the constitutional right to form a union.
01:45Including federal employees.
01:51But this president who tells people in West Virginia,
01:55always for working people,
01:58they just did a couple of things.
01:59Not only did they lay off tens of thousands of federal employees,
02:03they destroyed arbitrarily and illegally
02:06the right of federal employees to have union representation.
02:10And the other thing they did,
02:12and again, I'm speaking to people who voted for Trump,
02:15working class people, union members.
02:18They have now neutered the National Labor Relations Board.
02:22And you know what that means?
02:23It means that if workers today are forming a union,
02:26and millions of workers want to do that,
02:30they really, if the employer objects to the votes,
02:34it'll be tied up forever
02:35because there's nobody at the NLRB
02:37who can make a decision.
02:38They did that on behalf of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
02:43So thank you for your point.
02:44And yes, we're going to fight for federal employees.
02:46And thank you for what you're doing.
Comments