(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – National AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler is responding to the Trump Administration’s decimation of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), including closing field offices and drastically cutting the Agency’s Mediators and other Staff.

The Federal News Network reports the Trump Administration is cutting almost the entire workforce at the small, independent agency that handles collective bargaining disputes in the Private Sector and across the Federal Workforce.

The job cuts involve paring the Staff down from 220 to around a dozen Workers.

National AFL-CIO President Shuler issued the following statement:

Dismantling the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service - a small, but important Federal Agency that helps bring Labor and management together to solve problems between Workers and employers - will be a destructive move for Workers, businesses and the economy as a whole.

Shuttering FMCS means longer and drawn-out contract negotiations, delays in implementing new Union contracts that raise wages and improve benefits and disruption to the economy from strikes and lockouts that keep experienced, skilled Employees from doing their jobs.

This action is an attack on people who work for a living and will suppress the expansion of good Union jobs with fair contracts that benefit Workers and employers alike.

Once again, it’s clear the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency, overseen by billionaire Elon Musk) agenda is about what’s best for the billionaires, not the Working People of this country.

We’ll see the administration in court.

For More On This Labor News Report, Go To: Federal labor mediation agency cuts staff down to ‘skeleton crew’