Trump Is Trying to Axe Collective Bargaining for 1 Million Federal Employees
On Monday morning, lawyers for six trade unions that represent federal employees went to federal court in San Francisco, seeking a temporary restraining order against Trump’s recently signed executive order that aims to end collective bargaining rights for their members.
Trump’s order is couched in the language of national security, asserting that a union presence in 18 agencies — ranging from Social Security to the Treasury — posed an unacceptable security risk. The unions have pushed back, asserting their collective bargaining agreements with the government don’t in any way undermine U.S. security; and instead arguing that this is political payback by Trump against unions that he sees as opposing his broader agenda.
Trump’s gambit to end collective bargaining agreements with unions that represent roughly two-thirds of the federal workforce has received oddly little attention. During weeks in which Donald Trump has been throwing so much spaghetti at the walls that it’s hard to keep track of all the messes, this is one mess that hasn’t so far caught the public’s attention.
Given everything else going on, including the global stock market meltdown following Trump’s embrace of punitive tariffs against most of the U.S.’s main trading partners, that’s not a huge surprise.
Amid all this noise, many may have missed the massive public policy shift on federal trade unions, a move that could deeply alter the functioning of the U.S. government: In late March, Trump signed an executive order which, if it withstands legal challenges, will essentially end the right to collective bargaining for huge numbers of federal employees.
Federal employees right to unionize was established under John F. Kennedy’s presidency, and expanded during Nixon’s tenure in the White House. Effectively ending this right would vastly diminish the power of government-sector unions such as the National Federation of Federal Employees and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).
The order, using a rationale delineated in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, excluded from collective bargaining agreements workers in 18 agencies that are deemed to touch on national security. These include the Justice Department, Social Security, Veterans Affairs, Defense, Health and Human Services, the Treasury, and a raft of other agencies that, cumulatively, employ well over 1 million workers, or about two-thirds of the federal workforce.
Trump’s action followed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to strip TSA workers of their collective bargaining rights, reversing a Biden-era agreement to let TSA workers unionize.
In the wake of Trump’s executive order, Pam Bondi’s Justice Department promptly sued, in a reliably conservative court in West Texas, on behalf of eight agencies seeking to get out of their agreements with government worker unions.
Like so much else relating to Trump administration actions, the national security rationale for removing collective bargaining rights and breaking already negotiated agreements with unions is nothing more than a gimmick. For labor advocates, it is, of course, also extraordinarily offensive to posit the idea that unions are threats to national security — especially when those arguments are put forward by an administration whose national security adviser admits in a nonsecure Signal chat to actions that critics consider to be war crimes, and who reportedly uses personal email and other Signal threads to conduct his work.
Not surprisingly, the unions promptly sued, with the AFGE denouncing Trump’s order as “the biggest attack on the labor movement in history.” They allege the actions are clearly retribution against trade unions that Trump perceives as being aligned against him politically.
In this, they are largely backed up by the White House’s own fact sheet on the order, which says it has been implemented against unions who “have declared war on President Trump’s agenda.” The union interpretation is also backed up by recent guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, which informs agencies they can now go ahead and fire large numbers of employees, as part of their reduction in force plans, without regard for already in place collective bargaining agreements.
Perhaps more surprising than the howls of outrage from unions, however, is that eight Republican House members joined with Democrats in sponsoring legislation that would invalidate Trump’s order and continue to recognize already negotiated union agreements. Since the entirety of the Democratic caucus in the House signed a letter to Trump demanding he reverse course on this, and since several Republican senators, such as Susan Collins (R-Maine) have previously expressed antipathy to the notion of deunionizing the federal workforce, the numbers seem to be there for Congress to pass this legislation — though they are probably not there, ultimately, to override a Trump veto. This is, however, suggestive of the fact that there is a small but potentially crucial group of Republicans in Congress now gingerly testing the waters for ways to oppose parts of the MAGA agenda.
Meanwhile, millions of workers, already at the mercy of the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” are even less secure in their employment than they were last week. Their families are more vulnerable to financial emergencies. And the notion that the government can be relied upon to honor agreements that it has already entered into is further corroded. How any of this “makes America great again” is, I must confess, quite beyond me.