Trump Executive Order Ends Union Rights At Key Agencies | EUROtoday

The White House ramped up its assaults on federal labor unions Thursday by making an attempt to strip away collective bargaining rights from a big chunk of the federal government workforce.

President Donald Trump signed an government order declaring a slew of businesses ineligible for negotiating union contracts as a result of they’ve intelligence or nationwide safety work as a “primary function.”

The order claims the exemption covers the State, Defense, Treasury, Justice and Veterans Affairs departments, together with massive parts of the Interior, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services departments, and a number of other different federal businesses.

If the coverage survives a possible authorized problem, workers on the related businesses would not be coated by union contracts, dropping a key barrier in opposition to unfair firings.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the most important federal union, mentioned the order covers greater than 1,000,000 employees.

HuffPost reported again in December that Trump was seemingly to make use of a nationwide safety exemption to attempt to finish collective bargaining rights at a number of departments. The president has already revoked union rights on the Transportation Security Administration, the place it’s simpler to take action because of the regulation that created the company.

AFGE mentioned it was making ready “immediate legal action” to struggle the coverage.

“President Trump’s latest executive order is a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants — nearly one-third of whom are veterans — simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies,” mentioned Everett Kelley, the union’s president.

Although they’ll supply robust job safety, federal unions don’t wield the identical powers as their private-sector counterparts. They can’t discount over wages or advantages or name work stoppages, for example. And all federal workplaces are “open shops,” that means no employee could be required to pay union dues below the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration sees federal unions as a serious impediment to its targets of shrinking the federal government and shuttering businesses it doesn’t like. AFGE and different unions have led plenty of lawsuits geared toward blocking legally doubtful White House insurance policies, together with its “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation supply and its sweeping layoffs of greater than 20,000 probationary workers.

Kelley mentioned Trump’s efforts to weaken unions quantity to a menace to all employees: “Fall in line or else.”