News of the Week: NUHW staffing arbitration victory highlighted in SF Examiner
Faced with certain defeat in front of the Trump NLRB, a union representing graduate students at the University of Chicago announced last week that they were abandoning their effort to secure collective bargaining despite having won an NLRB-supervised election by a 2-1 margin last year, Bloomberg reports. The reason for the reversal, the union said, is Trump. His appointees to the NLRB have been busy overturning pro-labor decisions from the Obama era. After winning a precedent-setting ruling in 2016 establishing the right of graduate students to unionize through the NLRB, unions are now hesitant to test their luck in Washington, lest the current board reverse their victory.
Oral arguments are scheduled for next week in the Janus case, HuffPost reports. The case before the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to end requirements for public sector employees to pay a fee in lieu of union dues.
The anticlimactic failure of U.S. immigration legislation last week sent senators scrambling for fallback options to avoid the deportation of young people who arrived in the country as children, Bloomberg reports. None of the plans put forward so far are enticing either side as the clock ticks toward expiration of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that President Donald Trump has ordered to an end.
An official with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been placed on leave while the department looks into inflammatory social media posts, according to The Hill. Jon Cordova, the principal deputy assistant secretary for administration at HHS, previously shared stories on his social media accounts that included false claims about Gold Star father Khizr Khan, and Hillary Clinton. Following the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Cordova shared a story that pushed the conspiracy theory that Khan, who spoke at the event, was a “Muslim plant working with the Hillary Clinton campaign.”