Happy Labor Day — 2018 Style

     From the New York Times:

The Trump administration seemed to suffer a major setback recently when a judge rebuffed its efforts to impose tighter labor rules in federal agencies. 

But the judge largely found fault with the means by which it had acted, not with the ends it was pursuing: to make it easier to fire federal employees and limit the power of their unions. 

As a result, the administration may yet achieve the same goals. And according to workers and union officials, the effort has already created a climate of anxiety across much of the government. ... 

Few agencies epitomize this approach better than the Social Security Administration. Union officials say that while management has generally taken a more confrontational posture since the George W. Bush administration, the atmosphere has been poisonous at times under President Trump. ...  

[U]nion leaders worry that the Social Security Administration will seek to enact the same provisions through a short-circuited bargaining process. Under that approach, the agency could declare an impasse, opening the door for an outside panel — a body composed of presidential appointees — simply to impose most of what management had sought. ...