NTEU GETS HUGE WIN FOR HHS PROBATIONERS
Early in his 2025 revenge tour against the federal civil service, Trump demanded that agencies purge as many probationers as they could. Normally, he and any other President has the power to do that—if they do it according to the rules. But as our dear leader has shown repeatedly throughout his life, he feels rules are for other people. So, when the president’s toadies carried out his orders without any protest, it resulted in about 3,200 HHS employees losing their jobs instantly. But rules are rules and if any union is good at enforcing them it is NTEU. It not only alleged that the mass terminations allegedly for performance was an illegal attempt to avoid the due process RIF procedures of the contract and regulations, but also claimed implementing the terminations without bargaining violated federal law. And damned if it did not win at arbitration creating the potential for the arbitrator to order the retroactive reinstatement of the 3,200 along with any back pay, interest, and benefits they missed out on.
Huge wins are not new to NTEU. Way back in the 70’s when Nixon tried to deny feds their annual pay adjustment without following the rules, NTEU sued him getting over $500 million in backpay for everyone in the federal government. In the 80’s, Reagan’s crew tried to similarly screw all federal employees on a special salary scale out of their annual pay increase only to again run into NTEU skill at enforcing the fine details of federal regulations. The result was about $170 million in back pay for those feds. Then soon after 9/11 Bush’s minions decided they could change the start and quit times of over 10,000 Customs employees daily without following regulations or bargaining with NTEU. NTEU put that case to an arbitrator, Margery Gootnick, who overturned management’s actions. When the government tried to overturn the arbitration award by whining to a federal court of appeals that it would cost it over $900 million in back pay to comply with the arbitrator, the court effectively said, “Not our problem. Pay it.”
The next stop in this HHS case is a second arbitration hearing to decide on the details of the remedy. Then, the agency will probably ask FLRA to overturn any damaging remedy and even a federal court of appeals if that does not work. But with about 80 full-time lawyers on its staff, and a little bit of luck, that will only mean the size of any back pay award will skyrocket for the people who were treated so uinfairly.
