Recently unionized NIH scientists are very upset they will be temporarily hindered from using the American public’s money to engineer new viruses with which to terrorize that same public in the sadomasochistic ritual that is Public Health™ and to conduct research on behalf of pharmaceutical corporations to give the Expert™ stamp of approval to their sketchy products.
Related: CIA Finally Cops to Likely COVID Lab Leak Reality: Report
Via The Guardian (emphasis added):
A union representing about 5,000 researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a legally binding demand to bargain over Donald Trump’s sweeping policy changes, including a funding freeze, a communications blackout and a staff travel ban.
The NIH is the largest biomedical institution in the world, providing more than $40bn annually to fund health research, providing grants to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools and other research institutions globally, with nearly 6,000 scientists performing research in its own labs…
The UAW Region 8 director, Tim Smith, said in a statement: “These freezes are already causing research at the NIH to grind to a halt.
“UAW calls on the Trump administration, including acting health and human services secretary Dr Dorothy Fink and Congress, to either bargain with us immediately or to lift these draconian restrictions immediately to ensure that scientific research in the United States, including the crucial work done by UAW members, can continue without interruption.”
The NIH public sector union has only existed since 2023 and its contract is just barely over a month old: “The NIH union only secured a contract in December, about a year after the Federal Labor Relations Authority granted its approval to form. Its election win in 2023 amounted to the largest new union of federal employees to form in a decade, and the first at the NIH,” The Guardian added.
Related: BIG WIN: Trump to Halt Gain-of-Function Viral Research Via Executive Order, Per Report
I’m generally unapologetically supportive of private sector labor unions — an unpopular position among a large swathe of the right, to the extent “left” and “right” mean anything anymore — because they’re often the only leverage that workers have when they’re bargaining against mega-corporations with armies of lawyers and a million dirty tricks to suppress wages, including by creating monopolies.
However, public sector unions are a different animal entirely; it’s unclear to me why public employees taking public money get to bargain against the public by way of “labor unions.” The dynamics and interests involved are entirely different than in the private sector because the stewards of public money are notoriously less careful with their fiduciary responsibilities than a private company that has to answer to investors and other stakeholders.
I’m open to evidence that some public good has ever come out of allowing public sector unions — but if public school teachers’ unions are any indication, I’ll be waiting on that evidence for a long while.
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