Government workers are ‘canary in coalmine’ for Trump bid to gut union rights, leaders warn

The Trump administration has unilaterally stripped hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their union contracts after a federal appeals court overruled an injunction which halted the plans. It is just getting started, according to the White House.

An executive order issued in March sought to cancel all collective bargaining agreements for most federal employees, citing national security concerns – and remove collective bargaining rights from more than a million workers.

While unions including the American Federation of Government Employees launched legal action as they challenged the move, obtaining an injunction, this was in effect overruled earlier this month.

Union contracts at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture have since been terminated. An estimated 400,000 have been affected, about 2.6% of unionized workers in the US.

“I think that what this administration is doing is trying us as a test bed. If they are successful, I do believe that they’ll be coming after every labor organization in the US,” Everett Kelley, president of the AFGE, the largest federal labor union in the US, told the Guardian. “This is a fight for the very democracy of this country. This is a fight for every worker in America.

“If Trump is successful in dismantling AFGE, there’s nothing to stop him from coming after every labor organization in the country, and we believe he will.”

Taylor Rogers, White House assistant press secretary, said the recent appeals court decision “reaffirms that President Trump has the lawful executive authority to protect America’s interests, and may eliminate collective bargaining agreements in agencies engaged in national security functions”, adding: “The Trump administration looks forward to continued victory on the issue.”

The AFGE, which represents 320,000 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), received notice on 6 August – five days after the appeals court ruling – that union contracts would be terminated as a result.

In a statement on the move, Doug Collins, secretary of veteran affairs, did not cite national security, but claimed cancelling the contracts would free up time and resources across the department.

“There has not been a cancellation of union contracts on this scale in US history,” said Naveed Shah, political director of the veterans group Common Defense and a US Army veteran. “If the workers and veterans at the VA are not sacred enough to protect, then … every worker in the public and private sector should be concerned.”

Shah warned that cancelling union contracts at the VA would make it harder for workers to advocate for their patients and have a safe workplace, thereby degrading the care veterans receive.

“They have created division, anxiety and uncertainty in your daily life as a government employee,” said a nurse at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Queens, New York, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “This attack on the working class in the government is just the first step.”

Workers have won benefits and rights including the eight-hour workday, sick leave, workers’ compensation, fairness in promotions and the ability to raise concerns through labor unions, the nurse said.

“With the administration’s actions, they’ve taken that away,” they added. “With this administration coming in and politicizing the workforce and demonizing the work and the employee, it has taken away from our ability to really give the best to our veterans.”

The VA has long faced threats of cuts and services being contracted out to privatization, the nurse argued. “They’ve taken away the one entity that stood in front of the agency and held them to the standard, held them to the law, held them to the contract, and was also the whistleblower on all of the things that were wrong,” they added. “This administration has made a major step towards diminishing the care that the vets get. The vets deserve a certain level of care. That’s why the VA was created.”

‘Canary in the coalmine’

On 8 August – seven days after the appeals court ruling – workers at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) received notice the agency was terminating all collective bargaining agreements with unions representing workers.

“This is the greatest attack on labor rights since the Patco strike,” when about 12,000 air traffic controllers walked out in 1981, and Ronald Reagan responded by firing them and dissolving the union, said Justin Chen, president of the AFGE Council 238, which represents about 8,000 workers at the EPA. “And this is quite a bit worse.”

He added: “We’re just the canary in the coalmine for the rest of the working class essentially.”

The union is looking into additional legal avenues to protect their members, Chen said, as its lawsuit against the executive order is ongoing after the appeals court lifted the injunction.

AFGE is currently backing a bill in Congress, the Protect America’s Workforce Act, that would restore collective bargaining rights to federal workers. The bill has 222 cosponsors in the House, including seven Republicans.

In an April memo, the Chief Human Capital Officers Council ( stated that collective bargaining agreements should not be terminated until the conclusion of litigation, or the agency provided further guidance. Attorneys representing the Trump administration had cited the memo to judges that agencies would wait to terminate the contracts.

The office of management and budget did not respond to requests for comment on why union contracts were cancelled while the litigation over the executive order is ongoing. The Office of Personnel Management deferred to their director’s blog post.

“The administration, they know us as a threat to their authoritarianism essentially, they know we are the ones who represent workers who are civil servants who pledge to both uphold the constitution and serve the mission of their agencies, which is supposed to be politically agnostic and serve the public,” added Chen. “It’s very obvious that this administration, despite them trying to portray themselves as some sort of defender of the working man, they attack popular programs like Medicaid, they attack popular agencies like the EPA and the VA.”