Trump Is Right to Take On the Federal-Worker Unions

F ederal unions screamed in outrage when President Trump issued a pre–Labor Day order ending collective bargaining with several federal unions that have national security missions.

But Trump is merely channeling a previous president’s deep doubts about the practice in the public sector. That would be none other than Franklin Roosevelt, who laid the foundation for the landmark Wagner Act which empowered unions.

In a 1937 letter to the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, FDR supported the right of workers to organize to ensure adequate pay, suitable working conditions, and the addressing of grievances. But FDR believed that collective bargaining agreements were incompatible with public sector workforces. He declared that “we the people” set public policy through the democratic process in America; binding the people to a collective bargaining agreement takes authority away from the people. For the same reason, FDR opposed strikes by government employees as “unthinkable and intolerable.”

For decades, many union leaders agreed with him. “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government,” declared George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO, in 1955. In his view, government collective bargaining meant voters wouldn’t have the final say on public policy — a nondemocratic outcome. As late as 1959, the AFL-CIO Executive Council held that “in terms of accepted collective bargaining procedures, government workers have no right beyond the authority to petition Congress — a right available to every citizen.”

But things changed starting in the 1960s, when states and then-President Lyndon Johnson allowed public sector unions vastly more bargaining power. The resulting dues and membership bonanza changed union leader attitudes. Since then, the federal government has become the largest unionized workforce on the planet. It spends hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on collective bargaining. The result makes efforts to reform the civil service impossible. Scott Kupor, Trump’s head of the Office of Personnel Management, says the current workforce is characterized by “bloat, bureaucracy and a fixed mindset.”

Trump’s executive orders sharply limiting collective bargaining restore the proper balance that Roosevelt, Meany, and the AFL-CIO once recognized. The Supreme Court has allowed the elimination of collective bargaining at several agencies while a legal challenge goes forward.

The Center for American Progress estimates that over 80 percent of civilian federal workers are no longer covered by collective bargaining agreements. That represents one out of 15 workers covered by a union contract.

Reining in the power of federal public sector unions is part of a larger trend in American life: a smaller percentage of Americans are members of private sector unions than at any time in the past 50 years.

Today, only 6 percent of private sector workers are union members. Virtually the only unions that are growing are public sector unions — such as the teachers’ unions. Today, more than one in three government workers in the U.S. belongs to a union. But over 85 percent of those work at the state and local level — not in the federal government.

That makes it vital for states to follow President Trump’s lead — along with that of states like Wisconsin — and end collective bargaining for their public employees.