UAW Joins Critics Slamming RFK Jr.’s Cuts to Worker Safety Unit

The Trump administration’s move to gut the agency tasked with ensuring workplace safety is facing intensifying pushback, including from the nation’s largest auto union and a conservative lawmaker, in one of the more prominent public fights against some of the widespread cuts last week.

On Tuesday, the United Auto Workers union said it “adamantly opposes” the cuts to almost 900 workers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which does research and makes recommendations to prevent work-related injuries and illnesses, including chemical hazards. Created in 1970, the agency had about 1,300 workers before the cuts began.

“This attack on NIOSH workers will have far-reaching negative consequences for workers in this country and beyond, and we demand they be reinstated,” the UAW said in a statement.

The job reductions at NIOSH were part of a broader wave of terminations across the Department of Health and Human Services ordered by its newly appointed secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The dismissals started last week are expected to affect 10,000 employees, dramatically reshaping the agency.

Kennedy has said that 20% of the cuts last week may have been in error. HHS didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Cuts to NIOSH also included employees who work on the World Trade Center Health Program, which ensures that first responders and survivors of the Sept. 11 attacks are able to access medical care. HHS said last month that NIOSH will become part of a new entity called the Administration for a Healthy America.

While other unions, like those representing miners, have criticized the NIOSH cuts, the UAW adds an especially powerful voice to the opposition. With about 400,000 active members, the union secured significant wage gains from the three largest US automakers in 2023 after a six-week work stoppage.

In a letter to senators last week, a coalition calling itself the “Friends of NIOSH” also asked senators to reverse the cuts, saying “the health and safety of the American workforce is a shared goal of all our organizations.”

“We urge you to do everything possible to reverse this misguided move immediately so that NIOSH’s vital mission continues, and its workforce can maintain efforts to keep Americans safe and well,” said the group, which represents organizations dedicated to preventing occupational injuries.

Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia, said last week that she was “extremely concerned” about the cuts to NIOSH, which has had an office in Morgantown, West Virginia. Capito, who voted to confirm Kennedy as HHS Secretary, said she had told him “don’t cut into the bone here of HHS” and would appeal to him to reverse the cuts to the workplace safety agency.

“In this case, I have strong disagreements with the administration,” she said in an online video.

Top photo: Workers on the Ford F-150 Lightning production line at the Ford Motor Co. Rouge Electric Vehicle Center (REVC) in Dearborn, Michigan, on Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022. Photographer: Emily Elconin/Bloomberg.