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President Trump is trying to end collective bargaining for most of the federal workforce. He claims that having to negotiate with labor unions over workplace issues is getting in the way of his agenda. In some ways, he has a point. As NPR's Andrea Hsu reports, unions do serve as a check on presidential power.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: More than half of federal employees are represented by unions, but this wasn't always the case. President Kennedy first granted federal workers the right to organize and collectively bargain in the early 1960s. The government had been seeing rapid growth, as described in a film from the era.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: More than 2 million workers in more different kinds of jobs than there are in any other business conducting the biggest business in the United States, that of your federal government.
HSU: Nicholas Handler, a law professor from Texas A&M, says, at the time, the government was facing a recruiting crisis.
NICHOLAS HANDLER: They need scientists, economists. They need lawyers.
HSU: The government couldn't pay big salaries, but it could offer something else - stability and job protection, the right to be represented by a union.
HANDLER: Collective bargaining becomes an attractive tool for presidents to recruit people into the federal civil service that otherwise might be difficult to recruit.
HSU: And in 1978, Congress made it the law, asserting that collective bargaining in the civil service was in the public interest. And Handler says there was something in it for Congress, too. By giving workers a say in how they're managed...
HANDLER: It creates a way in for Congress and the courts to kind of police executive branch mismanagement.
HSU: Take a scenario in which a president wants to weaken a particular agency - say, the Environmental Protection Agency.
HANDLER: A backdoor way of undermining EPA enforcement is just to make life for a bureaucrat working at the EPA really, really miserable.
HSU: Collective bargaining gives those bureaucrats a way to push back, to preserve their ability to carry out their agency's missions as Congress intended. That was the idea, anyway. Now, Trump says, these labor rights are dangerous, that they make federal workers unaccountable. In late March, he signed an executive order ending collective bargaining at a broad array of agencies he claims have national security as a primary function. He's extended that as far as the EPA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Food and Drug Administration. His order faces multiple lawsuits. Already, unions have been sidelined.
ANTHONY LEE: Basically, we've been ignored.
HSU: Anthony Lee is president of NTEU Chapter 282, representing close to 9,000 employees at the FDA. He says the Trump administration has violated their collective bargaining agreement in numerous ways. Take recent mass layoffs. The contract says the union must get advance notice, but Lee only learned layoffs were underway when he started getting panicked calls.
LEE: My phone started buzzing at 6:30 in the morning.
HSU: Employees were finding out they were being fired while swiping their badges to get into work.
LEE: Green is go, red is stop, and it just went red, and they weren't able to enter the building.
HSU: Lee worries that if Trump gets his way, workers will lose the stability and protections that made working for the government worthwhile. He's especially concerned that scientists will lose protection from political pressure. Under the union contract, employees who review food ingredients or drugs have a right to flag safety or efficacy concerns without fear of retribution. Now, under Trump...
LEE: It remains to be seen as to whether or not they're going to allow employees to do the job that the public expects, protecting and promoting the health and safety of the public.
HSU: Now, one of Trump's repeated complaints is that unions make it too hard to get rid of poor performers. In fact, many union contracts do spell out lengthy processes for doing so. But Armando Rosario-Lebron contends his union makes the government run more smoothly.
ARMANDO ROSARIO-LEBRON: Our collective bargaining agreement is a huge efficiency boost for the government.
HSU: His union represents Department of Agriculture employees who keep invasive pests and plants out of the country. These people work a lot of overtime, and he says it's the union that manages that.
ROSARIO-LEBRON: How do you divvy that up so that it's fair to all parties involved? That is probably our biggest savings to the government, and I know that a lot of managers love that.
HSU: As for poor performers, Rosario-LeBron says there are plenty of times he's told someone, hey, what you did was wrong. We can't defend this. Accept the consequences.
ROSARIO-LEBRON: They're more likely to listen to us.
HSU: Get rid of the union, he warns, and management will be on its own. Andrea Hsu, NPR News.
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