Growing government workers union holds rally outside of EPA’s downtown Denver offices  ...Middle East

Workers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Enforcement Investigations Center, a forensics arm of the EPA headquartered in Lakewood, gathered in downtown Denver on Wednesday to rally against sweeping federal cuts.

“We are not waiting around until we lose our jobs or we lose our funding to highlight the important work we do for Colorado, for the whole nation, really,” Miles Batson, vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3607, said. “The main message is: Let us work. Let us do our jobs.”

Since President Trump took office, union membership has shot up among federal workers scrambling to defend their jobs amid layoffs and funding freezes.

Nationally, the American Federation of Government Employees, which started the year with about 300,000 dues-paying members, added more than 13,000 new workers in January, according to reporting by The New York Times.

In Colorado, the AFGE represents around 520 workers from the EPA Region 8 and National Enforcement Investigations Center. The number of dues-paying members has more than doubled since Trump was elected, union treasurer Athena Jones said.

☀️ READ MORE

“It feels terrible”: How one CU researcher lost her NIH grant and the impacts that will have

Colorado lawmakers finalize budget proposal. Here’s what they cut to close $1.2B gap — and what they didn’t.

Colorado is losing $250 million in federal funding for health services because of DOGE decision

But even as people rush to join, the number of paying members has not kept pace with the federal layoffs. Union staff at the national office have been warned about internal cuts due to dropping membership rates — the result of members being fired from federal jobs.

The dues that are coming in — which the treasurer declined to answer specific questions about — are increasingly being used for legal fees, Batson said.

“We’re trying to be proactive with our voices, but we have to be reactive with legal responses,” he told The Colorado Sun.

“We’re going to play the game”

Nine days after President Trump took office the AFGE sued the president and the Office of Personnel Management over an executive order that made it easier to fire probationary employees. On Feb. 4, the union sued the OPM again, this time over its “fork in the road” proposal, which gave workers little more than a week to resign. The union launched another lawsuit March 13 to stop the administration from canceling a collective bargaining agreement for Transportation Security Administration workers.

The probationary workers who were fired have been reinstated at the discretion of each agency, but are currently on administrative leave, Batson said.

“That’s a direct result of union dues, and union action and filing lawsuits,” he said. “It’s a shame that that’s seemingly our only recourse right now: suffer the consequences and fight after the fact. But if that’s their game plan right now, we’re going to play the game.”

The Trump administration is fighting the union pushback. On March 12, the OPM issued a memo directing agencies to ignore collective bargaining agreements with federal workers, if those agreements are “inconsistent” with OPM regulations or “interfere” with the management’s orders to reduce the number of employees during upcoming layoffs.

Ean Tafoya, vice president of state programs for GreenLatinos, told the crowd Wednesday that the instability in the EPA threatens relationships between the federal agency and local advocacy groups that have taken decades to establish.

“What I have learned over the years is that environmental injustice thrives in the frontera, the borderlands. The borderlands of local government, state government and federal government,” he said. “‘Oh, that’s Adams County, oh, that’s Denver,’” he said, pointing his fingers around. “So what we have seen over the years is everybody pointing their fingers like this. And for the first time, in a long time, we finally saw collaboration and cooperation between the Environmental Protection Agency and local leaders.”

Tafoya told The Sun that all of the contacts he was working with on a community outreach grant “ghosted” him shortly after Trump took office. “Everyone I worked with, just all of a sudden, silence,” Tafoya said. The Wednesday rally was the first time he’s heard anything from the office since.

Echoing Tafoya’s point, Batson said that departments within the EPA rely on one another for research and methods. “It’s all interconnected,” he said. Cuts to employees in the research and development office will disrupt his work as a forensic chemist.

“All this talk about efficiency and fraud and savings really falls flat when it comes to our daily work,” Batson said. “I’m a big guy, I want to lose weight, but I’m not chopping off my leg and saying I lost 40 or 50 pounds. These crippling cuts are not in any way going to improve efficiency in the work that we do. I think that’s widely felt here,” he said, gesturing at the crowd. “It’s just insulting.”

Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Growing government workers union holds rally outside of EPA’s downtown Denver offices  )

Also on site :

• Trump’s attack on diversity takes center stage as Boston remembers 1965 Freedom Rally led by MLK
• Pacifica graduate Nohl Williams drafted in 3rd round by the Kansas City Chiefs
• Lana Del Rey Sings About Kissing Morgan Wallen, Covers Tammy Wynette and John Denver, and Goes Swinging in Unpredictable Stagecoach Set