More than 445,000 government workers at more than 20 federal agencies lost their government union collective bargaining privileges last month. This came after a federal appeals court in California held that President Donald Trump’s March executive order ending collective bargaining for agencies with a national security purpose could go forward.
Every benefit granted to government unions is a power taken away from voters. Trump’s victory against government unions should be celebrated while Congress works to end their pernicious influence over the federal government permanently.
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Whatever one thinks about the need for workers to be given an antitrust exemption so that they can bind together for better pay and working conditions from private capital, the case for equal privileges for government workers is nonexistent.
Just ask President Franklin Roosevelt, who offered the following explanation when asked why he purposefully did not grant government workers the same collective bargaining privileges given to private workers in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” Roosevelt wrote. “It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations.”
Governments simply do not need union collective bargaining power to check their power over workers. That is what the ballot box is for. Every single grant of power to government unions is a zero-sum transfer of power away from voters. When government unions are allowed to set pay and working conditions through collective bargaining, they limit the power of the people to reform the government when voters determine that the government is not delivering the public goods paid for by their taxes.
This problem is compounded by the fact that government unions give almost all their money to the Democratic Party, setting up collusive bargaining situations every time a Democratic Party office holder sits across the negotiation table from a government union leader. Witness the deal signed by Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley in the closing days of the Biden administration with the American Federation of Government Employees, guaranteeing the SSA’s 42,000 staff members would not have to return to the office. The contract was specifically designed to thwart the governing intentions of the incoming democratically elected administration. Government unions are inherently antidemocratic.
For decades, federal government employees did not have collective bargaining privileges, and the government worked just fine. It was not until 1978, during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, that the Civil Service Reform Act first granted statutory collective bargaining rights to federal government employees. But that same law also included a provision empowering the president to “issue an order excluding any agency” from collective bargaining if the president determines that the agency has national security work as “a primary function.” It is that clause that Trump used in March to name over 20 agencies that he says include a national security function.
Democrats are trying to make Trump’s attack on government unions into an attack on all unions.
“This is literally the largest act of union busting in American history,” former AFL-CIO political director Mike Podhorzer told the New York Times. “There’s not another time when that many people lost their union.”
But Trump’s attack on government unions is not an attack on private sector unions. As noted above, private sector unions derive their collective bargaining rights from a completely different statute than the one governing government unions. The theoretical and legal basis for private sector unions is completely separate from government unions.
Trump may not end up winning every lawsuit challenging his cancellation of collective bargaining powers for government employees. It is easy to see how the Coast Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies touch national security. That is less true of the Agriculture Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. Which is all the more reason the Republican Congress should be advancing to undo the damage caused by Carter when he gave federal employees collective bargaining powers.