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Jason was elected to represent unionized workers at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in New York state. But on August 8, he got the same notice as 400,000 colleagues across the VA: their union contracts were being abruptly eliminated in response to a Trump administration executive order. It was a Friday, and by the following Tuesday he had to clear out the union local’s office, which was housed in a VA facility.
“I had to have a moving company show up, box up all of our equipment, all of our files, all the employee files,” says Jason, who requested I use a pseudonym and not identify his facility or specific profession to protect him and his colleagues from retaliation. That Tuesday morning, when he showed up, the locks had already been changed, he says. “It was unnerving, unsettling. Our management was meeting with the employees, telling them, ‘The union's gone. There is no union.’”
Jason fundamentally disagrees with this assertion. Management can tear up the collective bargaining agreement, but it cannot get rid of the collective identity of workers, he says. They can still support each other, remain in communication and community, and act in solidarity on the job. Now, Jason is part of a broader effort to maintain unions, and fight back, as an unprecedented number of federal workers see their collective bargaining agreements extinguished.
In August, the Trump administration unilaterally terminated collective bargaining agreements with major labor unions at numerous federal agencies, including the VA, the EPA, the CDC, and the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. The terminations immediately canceled bargaining agreements for nearly half a million federal workers, and as the president orders more cancellations, including for another set of agencies just last week, at least 1 million federal workers will be impacted, according to labor leaders. That represents around 7 percent of all unionized workers in the United States.
The developments were the result of a federal appeals court overruling an injunction that had initially suspended the March 27 executive order. The merits of the case have not been ruled on, and it remains active in federal court.
In tearing up contracts, the administration is citing the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that permits the suspension of collective bargaining for national security reasons. But workers say this justification is nothing more than a pretext to violate workers’ basic rights to collectively organize. And even a White House fact sheet points to other motivations, proclaiming that “certain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda.” |
