Unless they are able to act successfully to protect themselves and their rights, 2.4 million federal workers face a grim future. Alongside the prospect of hundreds of thousands of layoffs, Donald Trump has moved to strip nearly half of the remaining workforce of its collective bargaining rights and contractual protections. Those contracts provide standards, among other things, for vacation allocation, sick leave usage, travel reimbursement, promotions, overtime, and mediation or arbitration of disputes. They establish procedures for evaluations, telework implementation, addressing safety and health concerns, training, layoffs, and much more.
Six federal unions have filed lawsuits to stop deunionization. But their prospects are hardly a sure thing. Trump and his Justice Department went “forum shopping” to the single federal judge in Waco, Texas (part of the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals), seeking a finding from him that existing collective bargaining agreements for federal workers are null and void. Their case rests on the premise that the president may exclude from collective bargaining an “agency or subdivision [that] has as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.”
For example, one of the primary functions of workers at the Environmental Protection Agency, the government asserts, “is investigative work, namely conducting criminal and civil investigations into environmental violations . . . that are directly related to the protection or preservation of the military, economic, and productive strength of the United States [through] safeguarding the nation’s land, water, and air.” Although the Trump administration otherwise hardly seems interested…
Auteur: Marc Kagan
