TRUMP’S UNION REMEDIES TURN OUT TO BE AGENCY COLONOSCOPIES

At the urging of several right-wing clans Trump prescribed changes via Executive Orders designed to crush federal sector labor unions’ bargaining power. To those of us who read, it was totally predictable that his orders required agency negotiators to violate the law. They made about as much sense as his Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, and Clorox Chewables recommendations to treat COVID. So, we were not surprised to see yet another arbitrator rule last week that an agency’s five-year effort to negotiate a badly needed new term agreement was worthless and that management had to go back to square one to start the bargaining all over again. The discomfort, if not pain, Trump’s Executive Order remedies are causing agencies like this one now amount to the equivalent of withering organizational colonoscopies. We know of four other arbitrators who have reached the same conclusion in other agencies.

In this latest decision, won by the Federal Education Association (FEA), the arbitrator ruled that when the White House ordered agencies to adopt certain bargaining table positions under the threat of some top-down retribution if they did not, it ordered agencies to bargain in bad faith in violation of several statutory sections. Agencies are required by law to come to the bargaining table with open minds. Yet, when higher level officials tell them what positions to take they are not operating with open minds. Indeed, the statutory right to bargain becomes futile under those circumstances.

As a remedy, he essentially voided any existing agreements from those illegal negotiations and ordered the agency to restart term bargaining from the beginning. Stated differently, this agency lost millions of taxpayer money following Trump’s treatment plan.

Perhaps the only good thing to come out of Trump listening to the right-wing, union-hating, non-profit lobbyists is that case law has now ruled illegal one more of their schemes to crush the employee democracy provided by the right to collectively bargain.

Here is a copy of the FEA press release with a link in it to the arbitrator’s decision.