When President Donald Trump’s cabinet picks trooped up to Capitol Hill earlier this year for Senate confirmation hearings, hardly any boasted about their past union connections. But Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA) Doug Collins did.
He helped win broad bipartisan approval for his nomination from a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee (SVAC) that includes Bernie Sanders (I-VT) by mentioning that he belonged to the United Food and Commercial Workers, while working for five years at a Georgia grocery store chain. Said Collins: “I believe that the employees of the VA, whether they’re union or not, are very valuable and I respect that . . . I get the issue.”
At another point in the hearing, he pledged to “be the biggest cheerleader for every VA employee out there who is getting up every morning, doing it right [and] making sure we are taking care of our veterans.” And during questioning about President Trump’s intention to end remote work arrangements at the agency, Collins acknowledged that “a large portion of the VA workforce is unionized and they’re in contracts,” so “we’re going to have to work together to get people back to work.”
Four months later, there’s little evidence of Collins and VA unions working together on anything. Instead, Collins has been an eager implementer of Trump’s attempted cancellation of collective bargaining rights for most VA union members — on the grounds that they’re engaged in “national security work.”
Trump issued an executive order based on this far-fetched claim in late March. It invoked a provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA), which has long allowed the federal government to exclude intelligence agency and some federal law enforcement personnel from union representation. Under Trump’s sweeping new interpretation of CSRA, two-thirds of the federal workforce, in eighteen different agencies, would be ineligible for contract coverage because of national…
Auteur: Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
