Workers at Cincinnati's two National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health sites put on leave by the Trump administration last spring got a surprise in their email inboxes Wednesday evening: orders to return to work the next morning.
The American Federation of Government Employees 3480, which represents the Cincinnati NIOSH workers, says the reinstatements came to "a couple hundred" people who were placed on administrative leave by the Trump administration in April and May last year.
Since then, the union has been fighting the reductions in court and with protests. Still, the notices to return to work came as a surprise, Cincinnati union steward Hannah Echt says.
"This was definitely kind of out of left field," she said. "Our union and our members have been fighting to be reinstated for awhile now. But there was no notice things were coming down the pike so soon. Things were still playing out in court, is what we were thinking."
WVXU reached out to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which oversees NIOSH, to confirm the reinstatements and the reasoning behind them.
"Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, the nation’s critical public health functions remain intact and effective," spokesperson Andrew Nixon wrote in an emailed statement. "The Trump Administration is committed to protecting essential services — whether it’s supporting coal miners and firefighters through NIOSH, safeguarding public health through lead prevention, or researching and tracking the most prevalent communicable diseases. Enhancing the health and well-being of all Americans remains our top priority."
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. At their peak, about 400 employees in total were roughly equally distributed between the two. The reinstatements will bring many of the workers back.
NIOSH is responsible for research and recommendations aimed at preventing workplace illness and injury.
Echt told WVXU in April 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."
The Trump administration said at the time the widespread job cuts were 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 also saw some of those cuts.
The cuts to NIOSH were part of larger restructuring under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has indicated the department will cut roughly 20,000 of its 82,000 employees and consolidate its 28 departments to 15.
Echt says NIOSH employees at other facilities across the country, including Pittsburgh, received similar reinstatement notices. She emphasized that not everyone who was on leave will return to work immediately, if at all. Some employees who received the reduction in force notices from the Trump administration retired or took other jobs. They must now decide whether to come back to work.
While the reinstatement notices NIOSH employees received didn't provide reasoning for the restoration of their jobs, Echt credits the lawsuits the union filed and pressure from supporters.
"This is the result of the lawsuits, people calling their legislatures, that kind of thing," she said. "People put in a lot of work to get where we are today."
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