Trump orders end union protections for 450,000 federal workers in ‘largest union busting in American history’
Donald Trump promised his presidency would usher in a “golden age” for American workers, but his administration has gutted union protections for tens of thousands of federal workers in what labor activists and historians have called the largest acts of union busting in American history.
Nearly half a million federal workers lost their union protections last month in the wake of the president’s executive orders demanding federal agencies abandon collective bargaining agreements and appeals court orders upholding those decisions.
In March, the president issued an executive order ending collective bargaining rights for federal workers at more than a dozen agencies, effectively cancelling legally binding union contracts that cover a vast swath of agencies that are now on track to no longer recognize union representation.
Last week, days before Labor Day, Trump issued another executive order similarly stripping union rights from thousands more employees at six other federal agencies.
“This is how President Trump is commemorating Labor Day: continuing his administration’s all-out attack on workers and unions,” according to A.F.L.-C.I.O. president Liz Shuler.
“When those workers can’t speak up on the job and make sure their offices are serving the American people, we are all at risk,” she said in a statement last week.
Unions sued the administration earlier this year, arguing the president’s actions amount to retaliatory threats to workers’ First Amendment rights, but appeals courts have kept the orders in place while legal challenges continue.
Federal workers have had the right to collectively bargain over working conditions since the 1960s. Unlike private sector workers, they cannot legally strike, but they can help shape parental leave, overtime and other workplace issues and conditions.
Trump’s executive orders have characterized those union protections as a “war” against his agenda, while government attorneys argue that his administration can cancel contracts involving departments and agencies that deal with national security.
Even if Trump’s actions “reflect a degree of retaliatory animus” towards unions, they reflect “the president’s focus on national security,” according to an August ruling from a three-judge appellate court panel.
But the executive orders have gutted union protections for workers far beyond the government’s national security apparatus, including the doctors, nurses and social workers who care for veterans, as well as park rangers, emergency responders, scientists at NASA and the National Weather Service, and thousands of other rank-and-file federal workers who keep government services running.
“This is literally the largest act of union busting in American history,” said former A.F.L.-C.I.O. political director Mike Podhorzer, echoing Georgetown University labor historian Joseph A. McCartin, who earlier this year decried Trump’s “largest single action of union busting in American history.”
Trump’s orders also target scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, workers at the nation’s patents agency and hydroelectric power plant operators, and even food safety inspectors.
The union representing grocery and meatpacking workers denounced the Department of Agriculture’s decision to rip up union contracts covering food safety inspectors.
