Editors at National Review Online assess one of the Trump administration’s critical targets.
President Trump has issued an executive order that would eliminate collective bargaining for many federal employees. In one sense, it’s a start. In another, it goes too far.
Federal workers should not be allowed to collectively bargain, and for the first three decades of modern labor relations law, they weren’t allowed to. Even Franklin Roosevelt, the man responsible for the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and who sought to supercharge private sector unions, and Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor, understood that collective bargaining had no place in federal employment.
The reason is that the employer of federal workers is, ultimately, the people, from whom all government power derives under the Constitution. Unions are private, unelected organizations nested within the government with power to negotiate against the people over what government policy should be. They don’t fit in our constitutional order. …
… Trump’s executive order uses the CSRA to curtail collective bargaining. The law gives the president power to limit collective bargaining in portions of the government that work on national security. Trump’s order expands the definition of national security–related agencies for the purposes of the CSRA to include Defense, State, Veterans Affairs, and Energy, along with large parts of Homeland Security, Treasury, Health and Human Services, and others.
While Trump should use the CSRA’s power on areas that are truly related to national security, such as Defense and Homeland Security, the order follows a pattern of Trump’s actions by stretching the definition of “national security” beyond any reasonable bounds. The EPA is included, for example, and there’s simply no way that’s a national security agency.
Then, there’s the cronyism. The Border Patrol union endorsed Trump in the last election, and he has appointed the union’s former president, Brandon Judd, as ambassador to Chile. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, is not included in the order. Border security clearly is national security, so leaving the Border Patrol union untouched is not justifiable.
