First things first: President Donald Trump’s executive order on collective bargaining does not “strip unionization rights from most federal workers,” as some media outlets have wrongly stated. Not a single federal employee has lost his or her right to belong to a union.
What the order does do is end the practice of collective bargaining with federal employee unions in certain agencies and offices “with national security missions.”
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 specifies that the president may exclude any agency or subdivision from collective bargaining rights if “the president determines that … the agency or subdivision has as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.”
The executive order deems national security to include national defense; border security; foreign relations; energy security; pandemic preparedness, prevention, and response; cybersecurity; economic defense; and public safety (excluding police and firefighters).
Among some of the many affected departments, agencies, and offices are the departments of Defense, State, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and components of the departments of Energy and the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Nuclear Regulatory Agency that deal with domestic energy production.
Unions in all of the affected agencies can still exist; the agencies just cannot enter into collective bargaining agreements with them.
So, what do these unions and their members stand to lose without collective bargaining agreements? It’s probably not what, or as much as, you may think.
Contrary to private sector unions and state and local government unions, where the biggest bargaining chips are pay and benefits, federal employee unions are (with only a few exceptions) prohibited from bargaining for pay and most benefits, which are set by law.
Instead, federal employee unions bargain over things like parking spaces and telework, as well as workplace minutia such as the height of cubicle panels, designated smoking areas on otherwise smoke-free campuses, and the right to wear spandex at work.
Most—if not all—of these items are things that can be achieved through direct meetings between management and employees or even management and union representatives without requiring binding collective bargaining agreements.
The real loss to federal employee unions, and gain to taxpayers, is unions’ ability to shelter bad actors and poor performers. According to surveys of federal employees themselves, fewer than 1-in-3 believe that “In my work unit, steps are taken to deal with a poor performer who cannot or will not improve.”
While a multitude of federal laws and regulations already provide layers upon layers of protections for federal employees covering discrimination, workplace safety, whistleblowers, retaliation, and unjust discipline or termination, federal employee union contracts often add even many more layers of so-called protections that end up doing more to harbor problematic employees and impede agency operations than to provide legitimate protections.
For example, some of the many collective bargaining agreements include:
- “Progressive discipline” requirements that mandate a precise step-by-step disciplinary process before attempting to terminate an employee.
- A right for employees to go outside of the internal agency processes and instead challenge disciplinary actions through binding arbitration with an independent arbitrator.
- Limitations on reductions in force, including requiring agencies to explore alternatives such as retraining and reassignment before resorting to layoffs, and requiring seniority-based layoffs where those with lower seniority get laid off first, even if they are the best workers.
- A right to challenge management decisions—such as denial of a telework arrangement request—through the union grievance process.
Following these provisions and addressing grievances related to them takes time and money away from agency missions.
Moreover, unions can use allegations of agencies violating any of the terms of their collective bargaining agreement to rack up grievances. Unions then use those grievances—legitimate or not—as bargaining chips, offering to dismiss grievances in exchange for protecting poor performers or recalcitrant employees from discipline or dismissal, or to negotiate further rights or protections into the collective bargaining agreement.
Without the constraints of collective bargaining agreements, agencies will be able to focus more on their missions and less on compliance with collective bargaining negotiations and restrictions.
Federal employees will likely also benefit from increased direct communications with management, which, without a one-size-fits-all collective bargaining agreement, will have more flexibility to learn from and respond to workers’ desires.
And more federal employees will be working on agency missions because the executive order also eliminates “official time”—which is effectively “paid union leave” to do union activities—at affected agencies. Instead of being able to spend, in some instances, up to 100% of their paid time working for their union, federal employees will instead have to do the jobs they were hired to perform.
We don’t know how much time and money federal employees currently spend on official time because the Biden administration instructed agencies not to report it and removed the government webpage that tracks official time. The Trump administration recently revived tracking and reporting requirements, but data will likely not be available until next year.
We can, however, extrapolate that if federal employees in the Biden administration used as much official time as in the Obama administration, that would equate to about 2,000 full-time employees working exclusively for their unions. With average federal employee wages and benefits equal to about $163,000, that’s over $321 million per year that taxpayers have been spending to subsidize federal employee unions.
While federal employee unions are suing the Trump administration to invalidate the executive order, they should instead be looking for ways to work constructively with—instead of fighting against—the administration to improve accountability and efficiency in the federal government.
As the executive order noted, “President Trump supports constructive partnerships with unions who work with him; he will not tolerate mass obstruction that jeopardizes his ability to manage agencies with vital national security missions.”
