More than 445,000 federal employees saw their union protections disappear in August, as agencies moved to comply with an executive order President Trump signed earlier this year that called for ignoring collective bargaining contracts with nearly one million workers.
The termination of protections followed an Aug. 1 appeals court ruling on legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s directive. The order, signed in late March, directed 22 agencies to ignore contracts for employees in specific unions. Last Thursday, Mr. Trump signed a second executive order stripping union rights from thousands of other employees at six additional agencies.
Mr. Trump said that the affected workers had roles that touched on national security, and that provisions in their labor contracts could interfere with his policies being carried out. He cited, for example, the role that Department of Veterans Affairs employees play in providing care for wounded troops in wartime.
Federal labor unions targeted in the executive orders have repeatedly sued the Trump administration, and in some cases forced the administration to temporarily pause the president’s efforts to shrink the federal work force and reshape the government. The American Federation of Government Employees has filed more than a dozen lawsuits related to the federal work force. The White House has likened this to a declaration of “war.”
So far, nine agencies have terminated union contracts that covered more than 445,000 federal workers from the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, General Services Administration, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs, and parts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services.
“This is literally the largest act of union busting in American history,” said Mike Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “There’s not another time when that many people lost their union.”
The attack on public sector labor unions is part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to assert more control of the federal work force and make it easier to fire civil servants. The president has also crippled several independent boards that adjudicate employment disputes, interfering with a critical resource employees have to challenge their terminations.
Mr. Podhorzer and some labor historians predicted that Mr. Trump would strip bargaining rights from even more of the federal work force, and that the trend would eventually reach private sector unions.
For most of the federal workers who lost collective bargaining rights in August, their unions can no longer fight agencies over contract violations. For example, unions had been fighting Mr. Trump’s executive order from earlier this year calling for all federal employees return to work in a government office, even if they were hired as a remote worker or had that flexibility negotiated into their union contracts.
At the V.A., where 395,000 employees lost their union rights, people who planned to take 16 weeks of parental leave, as negotiated in their union contracts, will only have a guarantee of 12 weeks, the minimum required by law. About 1,500 food service workers across the country will no longer get meal allowances, like free lunches. And employees working long shifts are no longer guaranteed a rest period that was negotiated for safety reasons.
Union officials have said the loss of bargaining rights for federal employees inevitably hurts the members of the public the agencies serve.
Inspectors at the Agriculture Department’s food safety and inspection division no longer have a formal process to raise safety concerns about products without facing retaliation, said Paula Soldner, the chair of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, which is part of the American Federation of Government Employees.
“Inspectors are very reluctant to bring things to a supervisor’s attention in fear for their jobs,” she said. That could mean unsafe consumer products end up being sold to the public, she added.
At the V.A., employees regularly speak up about caregiving issues and appointment backlogs, said Naveed A. Shah, the political director at Common Defense, a veterans advocacy group.
“They could have addressed those challenges with management in the past and known that they have the support of the union to ensure that they aren’t going to be retaliated against or fired for bringing up those type of issues,” Mr. Shah said. “And now they don’t have that.”
That has already happened in the few weeks that nurses have been working without contracts, said Irma Westmoreland, a nurse at a veterans medical center in Atlanta and the chair of National Nurses United’s V.A. division.
This year, patient care problems related to staffing shortages have been on the rise because of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal work force, Ms. Westmoreland said. Nurses continue to document concerns, but agency managers have not been as responsive because they no longer have to be.
Union representatives can continue to help members with work-related disputes, Ms. Westmoreland said, but they have to take vacation time to do it.
The legal battle over Mr. Trump’s orders has continued, in some cases holding up the termination of more union contracts.
If the administration prevails, it could mark the beginning of a broader erosion of collective bargaining rights, some analysts said.
“What this does is signal to private sector employers that they can go to war with the unions” and not face legal consequences, said Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island.
Joseph A. McCartin, a labor history professor at Georgetown University, pointed to the impact of President Ronald Reagan’s firing of air traffic controllers in 1981.
“It demonstrated to private sector employers the leverage that could be had by taking an aggressive approach to unions, to collective bargaining,” he said. But what Mr. Reagan did in 1981 looks moderate compared to what Mr. Trump is doing, Mr. McCartin added.
“It is an action that’s almost incomparable in terms of what a president can do to undermine unions,” Mr. McCartin said.
And a recent decision in the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, if upheld, would further hurt private sector unions by allowing the president to fire board members of the National Labor Relations Board, which was created to oversee and enforce federal labor law.
The case is likely headed to the Supreme Court, with major implications for the future of the labor movement, Mr. Podhorzer said.
During his first term, Mr. Trump had a more moderate position on labor unions, Mr. Loomis said, and his labor secretaries operated within the standards of collective bargaining.
This time is different.
To strip collective bargaining rights from nearly half of the federal work force, Mr. Trump leaned on a provision in a 1978 law that gives the president the authority to exclude certain agencies or divisions from collective bargaining rights if there is “primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative or national security work.”
Mr. Loomis said that identifying national security as the primary function in some of the agencies targeted was spurious at best. But as a result, Mr. Trump’s directive applies far more broadly than previous orders.
In 1979, for example, President Jimmy Carter ordered employees in the Treasury Department’s office of intelligence support to be excluded from union rights. Mr. Trump’s order calls for the entire Treasury Department to be stripped of collective bargaining rights, with the exception of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
“We represent janitorial staff,” said Lee Blackmon, the director of the federal division of the National Association of Government Employees. “What is it that they do that impacts national security?”
Ms. Blackmon questioned why some federal employees represented by certain labor unions, such as the Teamsters, get to hold onto their bargaining rights while others who work in the same jobs but belong to a different union lose theirs.
“This latest executive order is another clear example of retaliation against federal employee union members who have bravely stood up against his anti-worker, anti-American plan to dismantle the federal government,” Everett Kelley, the American Federation of Government Employees’s national president, said in a statement, referring to Mr. Trump.
Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.
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