The Trump administration’s attempt to leverage a little-used law covering national security-related workers in order to cancel union contracts across the federal workforce is poised to draw lawsuits claiming it was misapplied to hundreds of thousands of government employees.
President Donald Trump on Thursday night directed dozens of federal agencies and offices to terminate their union contracts. His order pointed to a 1978 law that empowers the president to prohibit employees whose work “directly affects national security” from organizing.
The order is the latest volley in Trump’s battle to expand his power over career federal workers. Unions say they will challenge the order in court, as they have with the president’s decision to fire tens of thousands of their members and weaken their job protections.
“This executive order is plainly retaliatory,” said American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley, which represents more than 800,000 federal workers. “They are taking this action because AFGE is standing up for our members.”
Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan each used the same 1978 law to exclude smaller portions of the government workforce from federal labor protections, including the right to join a union and collectively bargain. In Reagan’s case, the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld his decision to exclude...
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