Summary:
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said Thursday that President Trump signed an executive order limiting numerous agency employees from unionizing and instructing the government to stop engaging in any collective bargaining.
The OPM memo references an order from Trump, but it is an accompanying fact sheet from the White House that lays out the rationale for the movie, claiming that the Civil Service Reform Act allowing government workers to unionize “enables hostile Federal unions to obstruct agency management.”
“President Trump is taking action to ensure that agencies vital to national security can execute their missions without delay and protect the American people,” the fact sheet states.
The order targets agencies it says have a national security mission but many of the departments don’t have a strict national security connection.
In addition to all agencies with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of State, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, the order also covers the Treasury Department, all agencies with Health and Human Services (HHS), the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the General Services Administration, and many more.
In total the OPM memo references 18 departments while also including numerous component agencies.
The OPM memo instructs agencies to terminate their collective bargaining agreement.
“Consequently, those agencies and subdivisions are no longer required to collectively bargain with Federal unions,” OPM states in its memo.
“Because the statutory authority underlying the original recognition of the relevant unions no longer applies, unions lose their status as the ‘exclusive[ly] recogni[zed]’ labor organizations for employees of the agencies.”
The OPM memo also says “agencies should cease participating in grievance procedures after terminating their CBA,” an abbreviation for collective bargaining agreements.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), condemned the action in an email to its members, saying the Trump administration was “illegally strip[ping] collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
I wonder what the police union has to say about this ...