White House Ends Collective Bargaining for FCC Employees

The order appears to not only bar future union agreements, but also dissolve agreements that are currently in force, said Littler Mendelson attorney Alexander MacDonald, who co-chairs the firm’s Workplace Policy Institute. The National Treasury Employees Union -- which represents FCC staffers -- and the American Federation of Government Employees have vowed to fight the order in court. It's “a brazen attempt by the administration to ensure its reckless assault on vital federal agency services can continue unimpeded,” said NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald in a released statement.

“The FCC Chapter of NTEU has spoken with our National office and, as expected, it will be quickly challenging the EO,” said William Knowles-Kellett, president of the FCC chapter. “We as a chapter are hopeful that the challenge will be successful so that we can continue to represent the FCC staff.” The NTEU’s FCC chapter has made it “a better place to work” and “helped attract a very talented group of people” to the agency, “who work hard to deliver on our important mission serving the American people,” Knowles-Kellett said via email.

The executive order is based on statutes that exempt national security-related entities such as the CIA from federal collective bargaining rules and vastly broadens the list of agencies defined as having as “a primary function [of] intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.” Along with the FCC, it lists roughly 40 agencies as working primarily on national security and intelligence, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Bureau of Land Management and the EPA.

Including many of those agencies in the same category as the CIA or NSA would appear to be “a stretch” compared with how these policies have been treated in the past, MacDonald said. Under the order, the exception from union bargaining contracts would extend to “[Veterans Affairs] employees who guard national cemeteries, right? Until this point, no one's really thought of those as the kind of national security agencies that are subject to this exception,” he said. A White House fact sheet on the order said the FCC is included because it “protects the reliability and security of America’s telecommunications networks.”

The fact sheet pointed to existing collective bargaining agreements from the previous administration and union grievances filed against President Donald Trump’s policies as justification for the order. “Protecting America’s national security is a core constitutional duty, and President Trump refuses to let union obstruction interfere with his efforts to protect Americans and our national interests,” the fact sheet said. “Certain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda.”

Because the order essentially wipes out union contracts for most of the federal government, it's “an existential threat” to federal employee unions, MacDonald said. Nearly half of all union members in the U.S. are public sector employees, he said. “They are going to put all their resources” into fighting the order. Courts are likely to focus on whether the White House can use a national security exception for agencies that don’t obviously fit into that category and whether it can dissolve existing contracts with unions.

The 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 [Trump's] harmful policies,” said American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley in a release. NTEU's Greenwald similarly said that “Federal employees, whose oath is to the Constitution, have called out the actions of the administration to dismantle the federal government.”

The Communications Workers of America also blasted the order in a release Friday. “When our employers violate our collective bargaining agreements, when they refuse to bargain fair contracts, when they stand in the way of workers’ organizing to join our union, we use every tool we have to protect our rights,” it said. “That is exactly what the federal workers are doing, and Donald Trump is attempting to punish them for it.” CWA vowed solidarity with the federal worker unions. “We will rally, we will march, and, if necessary, we will strike to ensure that every worker is able to join a union.”