Congress Urged to Block Memo on Defense Department Bargaining

Unions that represent employees at the Department of Defense want Congress to challenge a presidential memo giving the defense secretary the power to end collective bargaining at DOD agencies.

They’re also concerned that the reasoning behind the memo from President Donald Trump published Friday also could be applied to private-sector workers in defense-related jobs.

The defense secretary can end collective bargaining at DOD agencies where it’s necessary for national security reasons, the memo from Trump says. Though the memo by itself doesn’t end collective bargaining at DOD agencies, it gives the department the ability to do so when its chief determines that bargaining could harm national security. The defense secretary also would be able to extend this authority to other Senate-confirmed political appointees at DOD.

“Where collective bargaining is incompatible with these organizations’ missions, the Department of Defense should not be forced to sacrifice its national security mission” by having to appeal labor disputes to “third parties,” Trump wrote in the memo to Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

The department has more than 700,000 civilian employees and is the largest federal agency. About half the government’s 2.1 million federal workers are represented by unions, including a large portion of the DOD workforce. Presidents have long been able to exclude agencies from collective bargaining by asserting that unionization is incompatible with national security, but this authority primarily has been used to exclude specific agencies with national security functions rather than being extended to the head of an entire department.

Neither the White House nor the DOD responded immediately to requests for comment.

Memo ‘Unprecedented,’ Union Says

A letter to members of Congress from Everett Kelley, secretary-treasurer at the American Federation of Government Employees, urged them to include language blocking the president’s action in the fiscal 2021 defense authorization bill.

“The substance of this Memorandum is unprecedented and is clearly meant not as an effort to protect national security, but as an instruction to carry out the administration’s ongoing effort to undermine federal sector bargaining,” Kelley said in the letter to members of House and Senate committees with authority over the Defense Department. AFGE and other federal unions have been locked in labor disputes with the administration over a number of issues, including the ongoing implementation of three executive orders issued by Trump in May 2018 that together make it harder for unions to represent federal workers.

The administration’s action potentially could affect nearly 500,000 DOD workers, Kelley said in a statement. Civilians at the department have had collective bargaining rights since 1962, he said.

The administration’s assertion that unionization is incompatible with national security ultimately could affect workers outside the government, Paul Shearon, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, said in a separate statement.

“There are millions of private sector workers in aerospace, defense industries, utilities, and transportation who work on projects vital to U.S. national security. Is President Trump going to bust all of their unions, too?” he asked.

The IFPTE represents about 80,000 private- and public-sector workers, including DOD civilians at Navy shipyards.

AFGE, the largest federal employee union, represents a total of about 700,000 government workers, including about 300,000 DOD employees.