(Reuters) -A union that represents 150,000 U.S. government employees filed a lawsuit on Monday seeking to block President Donald Trump from stripping hundreds of thousands of federal workers of the ability to collectively bargain with government agencies through their unions.
The National Treasury Employees Union said in the lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C. federal court that Trump’s executive order last week exempting more than a dozen agencies from collective bargaining obligations violates federal workers’ labor rights and the U.S. Constitution and threatens the union’s very existence.
The NTEU said the order applies to more than 100,000 of its 158,000 members and would require agencies to stop deducting union dues from those workers’ paychecks, a major blow to the union’s revenue and bargaining power.
“The strength and influence of any union correlate directly with the size of its membership,” the NTEU said.
The NTEU said Trump issued the order to punish unions that have challenged many of his efforts to purge the federal workforce. The union has filed lawsuits over the mass firings of recently-hired federal employees, the shuttering of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and an attempt to make it easier to fire workers in policy-related jobs.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On the same day Trump issued the executive order, eight federal agencies filed a lawsuit against dozens of local union affiliates seeking to invalidate existing union contracts covering thousands of workers.
Eliminating collective bargaining would remove obstacles for agencies to alter working conditions and fire or discipline workers. And it could prevent federal worker unions from challenging Trump administration initiatives in court.
Trump in his order said that exempting large swaths of the federal workforce from collective bargaining was necessary to safeguard national security.
None of the agencies covered by the order are primarily involved in intelligence or national security work, the NTEU said in the lawsuit.
The order was “instead based on a policy goal of making federal employees easier to fire and political animus against federal sector unions who have opposed the Trump Administration’s initiatives,” the union said.
The lawsuit seeks a ruling blocking Trump’s order and barring federal agencies from complying with it.
Trump in the order excluded from collective bargaining obligations agencies that he said “have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.”
The order applies to the Justice, State, Defense, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services departments, among other agencies. The NTEU on Monday said the order affects 75% of federal workers currently represented by unions.
Trump’s order significantly expanded an existing exception from collective bargaining for workers with duties affecting national security, such as certain employees of the CIA and FBI.
The agencies that sued to invalidate union contracts said the Biden administration had entered into many of the agreements in order to impede Trump from carrying out his agenda, including a drastic downsizing of the federal workforce.
The unions that were sued last week by the Trump administration have not yet responded in court, but have said the bargaining agreements are legally binding and that the lawsuit is a meritless attempt to intimidate unions and workers.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Alexia Garamfalvi)
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