National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019--Conference Report

Floor Speech

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Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I want to start by thanking Senator Brown for organizing time for our speeches today and, of course, for his tireless fight on behalf of working people in this country.

I rise today to join Senator Brown and my other colleagues in standing with Federal workers in Massachusetts and all around the country--Federal workers who are under attack from all sides by the Trump administration.

There are nearly 30,000 Federal workers in Massachusetts alone, and almost a quarter of them are veterans--thousands of men and women who have put themselves in harm's way to protect us and then come home and continue serving their communities in the Federal workforce. These Americans work at agencies like the Social Security Administration, to help older Americans receive the benefits they have earned, and they work at the VA, where they help us fulfill the promises that we have made to our veterans. They help to keep our communities safe, and they help them recover after a disaster hits. They fight deadly diseases and work day in and day out to improve the health of our fellow citizens. Those are just a few examples.

But ever since taking office, President Trump has attacked these public servants, attacked their paychecks, attacked their working conditions, and attacked their retirement security in just about every way he could think of--freezing their pay and proposing draconian cuts to their wages and their hard-earned retirement benefits.

His latest assault, in the form of three Executive orders, undermines collective bargaining rights that have protected Federal workers' voices in their workplaces since the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 passed this Senate 87 to 1. These orders disrupt the bargaining processes that Federal workers have used for decades, and they interfere with the ability of unions to represent their members. For example, one of President Trump's Executive orders severely cuts down on the time that unions can spend helping their workers navigate the process for filing a workplace sexual harassment claim or getting whistleblower protections in order to report fraud and corruption in the government.

President Trump's attacks on these public servants and their rights undermine important government services and the rights of all American workers, and they are part of a clear pattern. Despite his campaign rhetoric from 2 years ago, the President's track record on standing up for workers has been absolutely miserable. From the day he nominated Andrew Puzder, an executive who delighted in mocking and belittling his own low-wage workers, to run the Labor Department, this administration has delivered one gut punch after another to American workers.

But that was only the beginning. In the Trump administration, workers in all sectors and all industries and in all parts of the country are under repeated attack. President Trump has signed laws, ended commonsense protections, and nominated anti-union and anti-worker judges--all of which undermine the rights of American workers in more ways than I can possibly count.

He has rolled back rules designed to make sure that Federal contractors don't cheat their workers out of hard-earned wages. He has delayed safety standards that keep workers from being exposed to lethal carcinogenic materials, and he has made it easier for employers to hide injuries and deaths that their workers suffer on the job.

He has opened the door for shady financial advisers to cheat hard- working Americans out of billions of dollars in retirement savings.

He has put anti-worker corporate attorneys on the National Labor Relations Board, which has now mowed its way through a giant wish list of areas where giant companies were begging to be left off the hook for violating workers' rights.

For the Supreme Court, he nominated Neil Gorsuch, a union-busting judge who was the deciding vote in the 5-to-4 Janus case, which was also an attack on public servants, nurses, teachers, firefighters, and police--the culmination of a years-long campaign by rightwing billionaires to damage unions.

The list goes on. After a year and a half of corporate tax cuts and rolling back commonsense protections for workplace safety, collective bargaining, retirement security, and more, we know that President Trump's promises to fight for American workers aren't really worth much of anything.

Like all of the attacks on working families that we have seen from this administration, President Trump's rolling back the rights of Federal workers will lower wages, worsen conditions, hurt retirement security, and squeeze middle-class families all around the country even tighter than before. But that is not all. By attacking the Federal workforce, President Trump is making it harder for them to do their jobs. That means he is undermining services that our seniors, our veterans, and Americans from all backgrounds rely on every single day.

In Massachusetts and here in Washington, Federal workers are saying: Enough is enough. So they are joining together, standing up, speaking out, and they are refusing to back down. Like so many Americans, I am grateful for their service to our country and to our communities, and I am proud to stand and fight shoulder to shoulder with these dedicated public servants, with their families, and with their communities all around the country. I am proud to stand with them. Powerful interests have been trying to break the backs of working people and their unions for decades, but we are here to say: We are not going away. We are going to fight, and we are going to win.

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