Trump administration nixes union contracts at FEMA, USCIS, food safety agencies

The Trump administration this week has continued its push to terminate its contracts with federal employee unions at agencies across the federal government, as labor leaders warn the actions will degrade the government’s services to the public.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court allowed the administration to move forward with plans, first laid out in a March executive order, to strip two-thirds of the federal workforce of their collective bargaining rights under the auspices of national security, while lawsuits challenging the edict proceed.

Though that decision was partially predicated on the idea that agencies would wait until the “conclusion of litigation” before formally terminating union collective bargaining agreements, the Veterans Affairs Department and Environmental Protection Agency ceased recognizing most labor groups last week.

The trend continued this week, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service all cancelled contracts with their respective unions.

In response, the National Association of Agricultural Employees, a union representing plant inspectors within APHIS, sued the administration in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, to block their removal from the federal workplace.

In addition to some of the same claims seen in previous lawsuits challenging Trump’s anti-union executive order, such as violations of the First and Fifth amendments, Richard Hirn, an attorney representing the labor group, said the plant inspectors wanted to highlight just how “absurd” it is to strip them of their collective bargaining rights under the guise of national security.

While a portion of APHIS’ work once touched on national security issues—inspecting plants and animals that arrive at U.S. ports of entry—that has not been the case in more than 20 years. The 2002 law creating the Homeland Security Department excised those functions from APHIS and placing them within U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency not covered by the president’s executive order.

“There were all these interagency memos about transferring the agency’s responsibilities against bioterrorism and against ag terrorism to DHS and how USDA wouldn’t do that anymore,” Hirn said. “The irony here is that the national security work that was being done by USDA now went over to DHS and is being done by CBP, but they’re not excluded from collective bargaining . . . I suppose some of these folks were working on eradicating Mexican boll weevils, but that’s not really national security.”

Paula Schelling Soldner, chairwoman of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals within the American Federation of Government Employees, had a similar response to the notion that FSIS employees are engaged in national security work.

“The only ‘secure’ thing here is the system where all of the food inspection data is kept, and if you want information from it, you have to FOIA it,” she said. “If you meet the criteria, they’ll give you that info. That’s security, but how is that national security? Everything else of what we do is an open book.”

Soldner stressed that she and other union leaders will continue their work to advocate on employees’ behalf, she warned that without a union presence on site to protect workers and serve as counsel during investigatory and disciplinary proceedings, supervisors at the agency will be emboldened to violate employees’ civil service protections. She has already seen fewer employees reach out to her for aid since Trump’s return to the White House in January.

“Now that they won’t have an opportunity to have a representative [during these meetings], the bad supervisors—and believe me when I tell you, I’d day say 80% are bad supervisors—if they see a person they’ve wanted to target for a long period of time but had protections as an employee, they’ll go after them to get rid of them and they can do it in a heart beat,” she said. “I’ll still hit all of my phone calls and have conversations with people, but since the 47th president came back into existence, they don’t want to step forward and say anything disparaging, because then they’ll be targeted and retaliated against.”

Food inspectors are already experiencing growing workloads due to understaffing, in part thanks to multiple rounds of the deferred resignation program, Soldner said. That likely will get worse without formal recognition of the union.

“If we’re short staffed, those employees simply will not be able to spend the time required at each plant,” she said. “If I’m assigned to cover eight plants in an eight-hour day, and I have travel 100 miles within those three plants, I’m just stopping and doing the bare minimum of work. I’m not seeing how they’re processing the food, I’m not able to observe and monitor the temperature of cooked or raw product. Ultimately, that will be the harm to the public.”