You must log in or register to post a comment. July 22, 2026 / Will McMahon Enlarge or shrink text login or register to comment Rochester nurses stood with non-union co-workers when the hospital tried to slash their health insurance. Now many of those co-workers have voted to become union members themselves.
Page A2From§Eachthe midnight edition — 26 September 2026
Administration mass-fires federal workers, discovers the law banning it was already on the books.
As it ran on the front
The chief calls it in from a hallway outside the Office of Personnel Management: somebody built a machine to fire people during a shutdown, and the manual for stopping it was sitting in the same filing cabinet the whole time. No new law had to be written to stop it. The American Federation of Government Employees and its coalition partners reached into the statute already on the books, filed, and on Friday won a settlement forcing the administration to abandon the policy outright. AFGE president Everett Kelley called it what it was: "Today, working people won." The people the administration tried to fire, Kelley noted, care for veterans, keep airports running, and make sure Social Security checks go out on time — the same paychecks the shutdown had already stopped.
The tinkerer likes this kind of fix because none of the parts are new. What the union did was refuse to let the tool rust. That's the mechanism: sue, cite, hold, and watch the other side discover the fine print it skipped.…
…(cont) The muscle recognizes the pattern from earlier jobs. In July, Rochester nurses stood beside nonunion coworkers whose health benefits the hospital had voted to gut. The coworkers won that fight, then went and voted themselves into the union that showed up for them. Solidarity isn't charity; it's recruitment with better follow-through, and this time it converted.
The pilot flies the long haul: in late May, a Honda worker in Mexico named José Luis Solorio Alcalá won reinstatement after a fifteen-year fight for the right to organize his own union. Fifteen years is not a metaphor. It is the actual time the tool took to work, and it still worked — the same lesson the federal unions just applied on a Friday timeline instead of a decade one.
The crew doesn't promise the next shutdown goes differently. It shows you where the wrench is, who forged it, and how long it's been sitting there unused while the other side bet nobody would pick it up.
“They tried to fire the people cashing your Social Security check without a paycheck of their own, and it turns out the law already said they couldn't — the union just had to drag the administration back to it. That's not a loophole, that's a statute sitting in plain sight while the West Wing hoped it stayed closed. Fifteen years, fifteen weeks, doesn't matter — the tool works when somebody picks it up.”
“Look, the administration has clear statutory authority to manage the federal workforce during a lapse in funding — RIF procedures, essential personnel determinations, all of it above board, none of it improvised. The settlement doesn't concede a single legal argument, it's just — okay, they agreed to stop doing the exact thing they said they had every right to do. That's not a concession, that's a scheduling adjustment. Did I say scheduling? I meant strategy.”
The receipts
A coalition of federal employee unions won a settlement Friday requiring the Trump administration to abandon its policy authorizing mass layoffs during government shutdowns, after unions sued to block the firings of thousands of public servants. “Today, working people won,” American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) president…
· Honda Mexico Worker Wins Reinstatement After 15-Year Fight from the morgue, 5 Jun 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.