Union representatives say the Trump administration's cuts to federal jobs have come to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health's Cincinnati office.
Hannah Echt is an employee at Cincinnati's NIOSH office. She's also a steward for the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3840. Echt said Tuesday about 165 union members, as well as some non-represented managers there, got notices their jobs were being cut. The union represents 215 employees at Cincinnati's NIOSH offices.
"This morning, as people came into the office and logged into their computes, they saw they got an email from the Department of Health and Human Services," Echt said. "Some employees were notified that a reduction in force was going to take effect June 30. And non-bargaining unit employees, management, were informed that effective today, they were being put on administrative leave."
NIOSH has two offices in Cincinnati — Pleasant Ridge's Alice Hamilton Laboratory for Occupational Safety and Health and Linwood's Robert A. Taft Occupational Safety and Health Laboratory. About 400 employees in total are roughly equally distributed between the two.
NIOSH is responsible for research and recommendations aimed at preventing workplace illness and injury. Echt says the Cincinnati offices have a variety of workers.
"We evaluate if hazards exist in a workplace and recommend ways to reduce hazards," she said. "We also have epidemiologists, we have health communications people, we have IT specialists, administrative staff who support our research and our projects."
Amel Omari is one of those epidemiologists. She received the notice her job will likely end by June 30. She's worried about the gaps in worker safety measures the cuts will create.
"It's just devastating," she said. "NIOSH works for the American worker, and we've been doing it since 1970. It's devastating to see that taken away from workers — not just from us."
The Trump administration has said widespread job cuts are necessary in the federal workforce to save taxpayer funds and to make the federal government more efficient. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency offices in Cincinnati have already seen some of those cuts.
Other NIOSH offices also experienced cuts today, according to media reports. A NIOSH office in Pittsburgh, for example, . AFGE says more than 800 positions across the institute are being cut — roughly two-thirds of its workforce.
Those cuts are part of a larger effort to at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this year, NBC News reports.
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