The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service has been destroyed. It provided free collective-bargaining mediation and saved hundreds of millions of dollars in labor costs.
Trump’s campaign tried to portray him as a warrior for the working class. Ads touting his no-tax-on-tips and overtime proposals flooded the airwaves. He gestured toward people who lost their jobs to deindustrialization with an embrace of tariffs (even as the incoherent approach raises doubts about the benefits of his promises). Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters union, even spoke at the Republican National Convention.
But the first two months of Trump’s presidency indicate that the working class and unions are, yet again, being thrown to the wolves as Trump caters to his coalition of billionaires and corporate villains.
In the final days of March, Trump unilaterally voided union protections for federal employees via executive order and tapped Crystal Carey of Morgan Lewis to head the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). As SpaceX and Trader Joe’s legal representation, Morgan Lewis spearheaded efforts to get the courts to declare the NLRB unconstitutional. Trump also cut programs that block forced labor and child labor abroad, making it easier for companies to threaten to outsource to low-wage countries and suppress salaries for American workers.
In a quieter but indicative move, Trump also slashed the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, a small independent agency that provides collective-bargaining and mediation services. It’s yet another thumb on the scale for bosses, in an environment where the odds are already firmly stacked against workers.
Established as part of the decidedly anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) has spent the last 78 years providing no-cost collective-bargaining mediation to unions and management. Taft-Hartley was enacted as a conservative response to the increased labor power and militancy of previous years, severely limiting the type and number of tools unions could leverage in disputes. Though not an egregious provision of the bill, the FMCS was nonetheless another concession to industry figures who claimed that FMCS’s predecessor in the Department of Labor was too worker-friendly. Despite its unsavory origins, the FMCS has since played a pivotal role in labor relations with an influence far exceeding its small size.
Prior to Trump’s executive order demanding the agency downsize to the “minimum presence and function required by law,” the FMCS had 222 employees, around 170 of whom were involved in collective-bargaining mediations and related activities in maintaining labor and management relations. In addition, FMCS also offers mediation in grievance procedures, conflict resolution training, and assistance in negotiations between interest groups during the federal rulemaking process. FMCS’s budget was $55 million, virtually a rounding error in the grand scheme of federal expenditures.
Free mediation in collective-bargaining negotiations is an especially vital resource for small or inexperienced unions that might otherwise be outgunned by their employers. When collective bargaining begins, the parties can agree to request an FMCS mediator, who uses their “knowledge of the industry [and] similar negotiated settlements” to guide negotiations—information that may not be available to a ragtag union, but is certainly known by high-paid employment lawyers representing management.
This is not the first attack on FMCS’s ability to facilitate unionization and collective-bargaining agreements. Beginning in 2022 under President Biden, the FMCS started offering free card check services. Card check is the process in which employees indicate their desire to be represented by the union by signing cards. Employers can voluntarily recognize the union and ask the FMCS to administer and verify the card check process. It’s a quicker unionization procedure that avoids the NLRB election process, where employees are often subjected to anti-union propaganda or other unfair labor practices that can sway their decision.
In early March, the Trump administration ended FMCS’s card check services. It’s the latest iteration of a long-running Republican effort to disincentivize card check and require dragged-out elections that allow employers to further stack the odds in their favor.
The FMCS is not just a resource for small unions that are most susceptible to falter under the weight of secret ballot propaganda and combative collective bargaining. FMCS has served as a mediator in some of the biggest and most contentious labor disputes.
Just last year, the FMCS helped facilitate a deal between Boeing and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), ending a two-month strike that halted production of Boeing planes. Javier Ramirez, Biden’s nominee to head the FMCS, was involved in negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers during the lengthy 2023 strike. FMCS mediators also served as intermediaries in the 2015 negotiations between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association; the 2011 negotiations between the NFL and its players; the 2011 NHL lockout; and the 1997 Teamsters strike against UPS.
Mediators at FMCS have clearly played a role in maintaining relatively peaceful labor relations throughout the country. Despite a meager $55 million budget, the FMCS is conservatively estimated to save the economy $500 million annually by helping avert costly work stoppages.
There is no “government efficiency” argument for gutting an agency that produces nearly ten times its budget in economic savings. Following the downsizing, the current breakdown of staff is unclear, but it will simply be impossible for what few mediators remain to continue providing services to all ongoing negotiations, let alone those requested in the future. This means more contentious negotiations, more unions potentially stamped out by employers and their hardball lawyers, and quite likely more labor strikes (and thus employers idled).
These cuts, along with Trump’s other actions with respect to labor-management relationships, have ominous implications for working people and their unions. Trump’s executive order regarding federal employee unions claims that national-security concerns preempt the labor rights of the employees. The Taft-Hartley Act contains a similar provision that allows the president to end strikes that “imperil the national health or safety.” It’s easy to imagine Trump disingenuously using this tool to squash labor power rather than wait for the mediation process at a skeletal FMCS or the National Mediation Board, its sister agency that oversees disputes in the airline and railroad industries.
While Trump uses one hand to throw breadcrumbs to working people through counterproductive promises of tax relief and protectionist tariffs, the other is crushing the few tools that workers have to build real power and guarantee dignified working conditions.