The unions of the federal employees fight for survival while Trump tries to take them off

By the end of March, Anthony Lee should have got a head that the mass decisions at Food and Drug Administration would just be beginning.

Instead, the union's president found out when he was panicked one morning in the morning.

The employees learned that they were released when they were shot with their badges to get to work. A green light meant Go. A red light stopped.

“For dozens, hundreds of employees, it simply got red and they were unable to enter the building,” says Lee. “So many people found out that their federal service ended.”

Lee is the President of NEU Chapter 282, the union, which represents almost 9,000 FDA employees. As part of the union's collective agreement, the government must provide a prerequisite for reducing violence.

But the Trump administration did not notice such an announcement. It also did not advise Lee when it ended the union's telephone contract.

“Basically, we were ignored,” says Lee.

Attacks on unions “exponentially worse”

The antipathy of President Trump vis -à -vis the unions of the Federal Sector is known. Nevertheless, Lee says that Trump's attacks on unions are now “exponentially worse” than in the first term of the president.

“Even our ability to exist in the work in the work – to be able to represent employees – is threatened by this administration,” he says.

Trump's efforts to reduce the federal assistant through hundreds of thousands of employees could decimate union negotiation units. And even where the workers still stay, he ended the right to union representatives for broad parts of the workforce.

At the end of March, Trump issued an executive regulation that ended the tariff rights for most federal employees, and cited a provision of the Federal Law, which gives the president the authority to do so with agencies that have national security.

Employees of agencies such as the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency have no collective bargaining rights.

Trump's Executive Order went much further and a wide range of agencies, for which these exclusions have never been used, including the environmental protection authority, the Department of Veteran Affairs and the FDA.

Several complaints question this order. At the end of April, a federal judge issued an injunction that blocked it for the time being, but the Trump government has appealed against this decision.

Collective negotiations as a review of the presidential power

Trump has argued that his ability to manage the government as soon as he looks at having to negotiate unions about at work.

Some would say that is design.

In A New York University Law Review articleNicholas Handler, a deputy professor of law at the Texas A&M School of Law, argues that collective bargaining is used as a review of the presidential power. The binding agreements that negotiate unions with federal authorities about personnel matters such as working conditions, performance checks and complaints procedures, “hold and change the authority to manage the pension of the German bureaucracy,” he writes.

Officials didn't always have this lever. In the first half of the 20th century, even as unions, there was strength elsewhere, the fear of communicating federal workers too much on how the nation laws were carried out. After all, officials serve the American people.

Therefore, federal employees have never had the right too strike. You can't negotiate wages either.

A recruitment crisis led to a turning point

In the early 1960s, however, the federal government looked like a labor crisis. Scientists, economists and lawyers for providers of employees needed, but it could not pay large salaries. What it could offer was stability, workplace protection and – after President John F. Kennedy signed an executive regulation in 1962 – the right to organize himself unionized.

“Collective negotiations become an attractive instrument for presidents to recruit people into the public service of the federal government and to take advantage of many of these highly qualified employees who may otherwise be difficult to recruit,” says Handler.

The congress later encoded this occupational safety in the law on the public service of 1978 and claimed that the right to organize and joint negotiation “contributes to the effective behavior of the public company” and “protects the public interest”.

Through the law, the congress also created a way for itself and the dishes to polish the executive, says Handler.

Consider a scenario in which a president wants to weaken a certain agency like the EPA. One way to undermine the agency is to make life unhappy for the EPA workers, he explains. Collective negotiations give these employees the opportunity to push back and maintain their ability to fulfill the mission of their agency as intended.

According to Trump, these employment law congress, founded in 1978, makes the federal workers inexplicable.

“The CSRA enables enemy unions to hinder agency administration,” says a document of the White House in which its executive regulation is explained. “This is dangerous in agencies with national security responsibility.”

Lose protection that made the jobs worthwhile

Lee, a 23-year-old veteran of the FDA and also fears that the workers are the stability and protection that is worth working for the government when Trump does his passage.

He is particularly concerned that scientists become susceptible to political pressure. As part of the trade union contract, employees who check food ingredients, medicines and medical devices without fear of retaliation, security or effectiveness concerns must be marked.

“It remains to be seen whether they allow employees or not to do the work that the public expects and protects and promotes the health and security of the public,” says Lee.

A debate about efficiency

One of Trump's repeated complaints is that unions make it too difficult to get rid of bad actors. Many union contracts prepare long processes for this.

But others claim unions help to make the government more smooth.

“Our collective agreement is an enormous increase in efficiency for the government,” says Armando Rosario-Lebron, Vice President of the National Association of Agriculture Employees, which represents the employees of the animal and plant health inspection service of US agriculture.

His negotiating unit includes people who have the task of keeping invasive pests and plants outside the country that requires a lot of overtime. Rosario Lebron says that the union largely manages this.

“You have some employees who want as much overtime as possible to be revised, so to speak. You have other employees who do not want to be revised to death,” he says.

It is likely that Rosario Lebron will represent the union's largest savings for the union's largest saving for the union's largest savings for the union's largest savings.

“I know that many managers love it,” he says.

Rosario-Lebron says that he tried to build most disputes outside of the formal complaint procedure. He says there are many times in which he prevents employees from pursuing symptoms that he sees as light -hearted.

“I do not recommend that you go this way because it will not end well for you,” he says, he told you.

The employees rather listen to the union in such matters, he says.

He has a warning for the Trump administration: the union and management will be going on alone.

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