(A News and Sentinel Op-Ed - Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)

A recent article in the publication Government Executive dated Aug. 29 titled “Federal Collective Bargaining is in the U.S National Interest” is one of the best-written and most powerful pieces I’ve read on Trump’s unlawful and nonsensical executive orders stripping the vast majority of federal civil servants of collective bargaining rights.

The piece was written by Robert Tobias and Ron Sanders. Both Tobias and Sanders are elected Fellows of the National Academy of Public Administration. Sanders was a civil servant for almost 40 years (over 20 as a member of the Senior Executive Service) and served as director of civilian personnel for the Defense Department, chief human resources officer for IRS, and associate director for HR strategy at OPM, as well as the chair of the Federal Salary Council in the first Trump administration.

Tobias is the former National President of the National Treasury Employees Union (for which I serve as Chief Steward of Chapter 190 at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service in Parkersburg), where he represented over 90,000 IRS employees. The balance of the piece, having been written by a longtime member of management and a longtime union official together, is at the core of what makes it so meaningful and effective.

To do the piece justice here, I will need to quote from it pretty extensively. I strongly encourage you to find and read the piece in its entirety online. It’s not particularly lengthy for those with TL;DR concerns and every word is so important. I offer here the best summation I can:

“A bit of history is in order here. Congress first sanctioned collective bargaining in the private sector with the 1935 Wagner Act because it ‘encourage(d) practices fundamental to the friendly adjustment of industrial disputes.’ President Kennedy later applied that same rationale to the federal sector in 1962 when he signed Executive Order 10988, and President Nixon reaffirmed it in Executive Order 11491 in 1971. Those executive orders–as well as their rationale and their adjudicatory model–were subsequently codified in federal law by a bipartisan Congress in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which included the Federal Labor-Management Relations Statute as its Title VII.

“In so doing, that bipartisan Congress passed the CSRA by a vote of 85 to 1 in the Senate and 365 to 8 in the House, declaring that ‘…experience in both private and public employment indicates that the statutory protection of the right of employees to organize, bargain collectively, and participate through labor organizations…safeguards the public interest…contributes to the effective conduct of public business, and facilitates and encourages the amicable settlements of disputes…therefore, labor organizations and collective bargaining in the civil service are in the public interest.’

“Congress was fully aware of what it was doing. Their action then and now represents literally decades of unequivocal support for the push and pull and give and take of collective bargaining. While federal unions may ‘frustrate’ agencies and delay this or any president’s agenda in a non-emergency situation, that frustration is not a justification for extinguishing the right of federal employees to bargain in the federal sector and thereby ignore the public interest that that bargaining serves.”

Trump’s executive order from March, Executive Order 14251, as well as an additional EO from Aug. 27, have been used to arbitrarily and capriciously classify over 2/3 of the federal workforce as having “…as their primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work” so as to enable Trump to revoke their collective bargaining rights under CSRA. However, as the authors point out, “…those federal employees whose work may actually impact national security–such as law enforcement officers like uniformed Border Patrol personnel at the Department of Homeland Security…are not covered by any such national security exclusion.”

The authors also point out that “The 1978 CSRA already provides two complimentary procedures to prevent ‘national security’ from invading the sphere of federal collective bargaining.” The authors then share the facts that any union proposal deemed by an agency to impede national security may be declared “non-negotiable” (if the union disagrees, the dispute can be adjudicated by the Federal Labor Relations Authority) and that Section 7106(a)(2)(D) of the CSRA grants agencies emergency powers to override collective bargaining agreements to carry out their missions so long as bona fide national security issues emerge, solutions for which would be impeded by collective bargaining obligations.

The authors conclude their piece by saying “Bottom line: The actions of the Trump Administration are unnecessary, unjustified and not in the public interest. They should be rescinded either by the president himself and/or by the Congress.” There is interest in Congress, with some limited Republican support, in passing legislation to restore and protect federal employee collective bargaining rights. In order for it to become law, though, it would have to be tucked into must-pass legislation that would not face the threat of Senate filibuster or presidential veto.

I’ve spoken directly with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on federal employee collective bargaining rights in Lenore, WV on Aug. 9 and the Senator is incredibly supportive of such legislative efforts, but unfortunately West Virginia’s congressional delegation stands in the way and in support of Trump’s union-busting efforts. Final federal court decisions on restoring federal employee collective bargaining rights under the CSRA by ruling these executive orders unlawful are pending, but I’m skeptical of the willingness of a majority on SCOTUS (which will undoubtedly hear appeals on these cases) to abide by tatutory law and restore these rights. Let us hope common sense and the rule of law prevail one way or the other.