It's a long shot, all things considered. Still, if Donald Trump is successful in ending unionization rights for 75% of federal workers, it would be a big step for the executive branch to gain control of its workforce.
Trump issued an executive order on Thursday night that tries to shoehorn an exemption for many federal agencies from having to bargain collectively. According to Politico, the order is based on an obscure provision of the federal labor laws that "authorizes the president to exclude agencies from long-standing unionization rights if he determines that those agencies are primarily engaged in national security work."
The order would end collective bargaining for most employees in several agencies and departments, including the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, State, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the EPA and USAID. The order also allows the transportation secretary to exclude the Federal Aviation Administration from labor rights, meaning the air traffic controllers' union is in trouble.
The order affects about 67% of the entire federal workforce and 75% of unionized workers.
The number one opponent of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been government employee unions, which are resisting the efforts to gain access to sensitive federal data, to block policies making it easier to fire government officials, and lay off probationary workers.
It's not just their opposition that's driving this executive order. Both left and right have been questioning the efficacy of public employee unions in recent years as government workers move away from being servants of the people to owning them.
Philip K. Howard, writing in the left-wing Daily Beast, believes that public sector unions have "undermined constitutional governance."
"There’s no hope of restoring trust to police, fixing bad schools, or marshalling resources for the public good," writes Howard, "until democratic authority is restored to government operations."
Democracy can’t work when accountability has been removed, when work rules and veto powers preclude effective use of public resources, and when unions flex political power to harm the public good. Public employees owe a fiduciary duty to serve the public, not demand rights that harm the public. This is why FDR, a vigorous advocate for labor unions, believed that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
Howard continued to make the argument on the pages of Time Magazine. Commenting on the election of the teachers' union candidate, Brandon Johnson, Howard points out that the power of public sector unions takes governance out of the hands of elected officials.
What is wrong with this picture? The new mayor is supposed to manage Chicago for all the citizens, not to benefit public employees. Chicago is not in good shape. In 37 of its schools, not one student is proficient in reading or math. Its transit system is stuck with schedules that serve no one at great expense. The crime rate in Chicago is among the highest in the country. But no recent Chicago mayor has been able to fix these and other endemic problems because the public unions have collective bargaining powers that give them a veto on how the city is run. Frustrated by the inability to get teachers back to the classroom during Covid, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot observedthat the teachers union wanted “to take over not only Chicago Public Schools, but take over running the city government.”
Over the last 75 years, government at all levels has grown beyond any one person's control. In the absence of democratic governance, unions have moved into the void to assert control and have supplanted elected officials as overseers. If they don't much like what the government is doing, they can call for a strike or some other kind of political action.
And there's nothing elected officials can do except acquiesce.
