Summary
The Trump administration abruptly fired multiple National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) employees, then struggled to reinstate some due to a lack of updated contact information.
The NNSA, which oversees the U.S. nuclear stockpile, asked remaining employees to relay the message.
The terminations, part of mass federal layoffs orchestrated by Trump and Elon Musk, coincided with a Russian drone strike on Chernobyl, raising security concerns.
It would be absolutely hilarious if the workers took this opportunity to unionize and negotiate getting their jobs back with higher pay and better benefits.
Or unionize as consultants, at double the pay, plus benefits.
unionize as consultants
The two groups don’t often overlap. That’s like “flying as sharks”.
Consultants, by their nature, may have drastically-reduced job security, something people usually want from a union when they can’t get it from their government.
It’s context dependent. Some fields are inherently batch work. E.g. TV. In these cases, unions can allow contractors to set pay baselines etc, without a race to the bottom. Otherwise big companies can try and play us off against each other.
E.g. BECTU (uk tv union) organised a strike against a company last year, after they changed their invoice pay time to 3 months.
Not sure its unionizing - just charging the market rate for highly valued skills and knowledge. We should be infuriated as tax payers that we are going to end up paying more because of this debacle.
I thought the federal employees were unionized to some degree, but were still fired? I read something to that effect a week ago but the article didn’t go into much detail.
They’re unionized but lack the ability to strike.
And, yes, it does make the union largely useless. They can file lawsuits, and cite law, and involve themselves in employee arbitration, but that only matters when the opposition engages in good faith.
Suddenly, it’s not so difficult to believe that he bankrupted a casino.
3 casinos, even! And he’s had 6 total corporate bankruptcies!
This is management at its best.
Never let a business person near a functioning business. Never, ever let a business person be in charge of government.
In my professional experience it’s most specifically people with a sales and sales-like background (which includes grifters).
People whose speciality is “wheeling and dealing” are horrible at managing anything whose success criteria is not purely based on convincing other people of something, so basically anything were actual things must be created, made, distributed and so on.
Since they can’t actually make things work, they instead try and manipulate perception around it to convince others that things are working or for them to do it for them, and the former only holds for a while whilst problems accumulate and things eventually fail in an too-big-to-be deniable way (at which point they try to dump the blame on somebody else), whilst the latter when done by somebody supposedly leading something just yields a parasite manager that doesn’t manage and whose selection of manpower is based on how easy it is to manipulate their “underlings” rather than competence, so things get badly done but said “manager” can’t actually tell until it’s too late.
A lot of the cultural issues in the modern US can be traced back to Pat Robertson.
A lot of the economical issues in the modern US business can be traced back to Jack Welch.
Fuck that asshole.
I’ve definitely seen this to be true on the local level for years. So much potential for conflict of interest if nothing else. And yeah I think it applies even more to national government.
MoVe FaSt AnD bReAk ThInGs
I’m waiting to see the headline: “Fired NNSA employees can’t be found for reemployment because they moved to off-grid locations outside the blast-radius of all major centres”
Back in the day. If you did nuclear work for the government they would keeps tabs on you for some time. Maybe they fired those people too. Who knows.
Man, if this was me I just straight up wouldn’t go back.
Who the fuck wants to go back to a job where you can get fired out of the blue
Who the fuck wants to go back to a job where you can get fired out of the blue
That’s pretty much any job in america dude…
because you are in a position to resist and negotiate for more money now.
Until they decide to fire you again.
Oh that’s expected. Before that was time for weaponized incompetency and/or causing tons of roads Blocks that can’t move anywhere. Can’t let children run rampaging. Rosa parks is example of just doing nothing to further a bad agenda can have ripples.
Yeah no. I have a family. I’d rather have stable income thanks
Fair play. That’s what they are banking on and why most people don’t so anything. Then replace with some loyal dog that will do anything.
For most roles, I could see that being the case. For this one? They are hiring back because they don’t know what the hell is going on
That’s the best part, now they know they need you. Time to sit pretty while doing the minimum to assist/delay the administration. They gonna fire you again after they derped? Possibly, but the point is to keep nuclear safety in safer hands.
And in the confusion… the government lost track of several nuclear weapons
Russia lost track of something like 75 “suitcase nukes” as they went missing and often sold off a truck, right after the fall of the Soviet union.
Because we needed more parallels to Russia.
“Everybody is replaceable” is only true for menial jobs. Some jobs are so critical and demand so much specialization that sometimes there’s only one person that can do it right.
“We’ve been trying to reach you about your expired nuclear safety job” /s
Glowing demonstration of eggsceptional management skills.
I’d prefer if things don’t glow, thank you very much.
Can’t wait until they fire half of NASA and then we lose all of our satellite, launch, tracking and deep space capabilities.
Whoops, we abandoned all the astronauts in orbit when we shut down Houston! Guess they’re on their own! What do you mean, the ISS is about to crash into Washington DC?!
fafo
Now imagine what would happen if this had happened a year in the future… Everybody has new gigs, no intentions of coming back, and the institutional knowledge has been lost. Almost makes you think that these 2 presidents might be traitors
Elect a clown, expect a circus.
Maybe he lost nuclear weapons firing sequence.
Prob for the best