
Several unions are asking Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins to exempt them from an executive order barring collective bargaining within the department. Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images
Unions urge VA to restore bargaining ahead of deadline
President Trump’s order extending a ban on collective bargaining to additional agencies opened the door for more labor groups to continue representing employees at the Veterans Affairs and Defense departments.
The leaders of more than half a dozen federal employee unions last week urged Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins to restore collective bargaining rights for most departmental employees, after President Trump’s executive order expanding his push to ban unions for two-thirds of the federal workforce extended a deadline for agencies to exempt labor groups from the edict.
In March, Trump signed an executive order barring unions at most federal agencies under the auspices of national security. The edict provided the secretaries at the VA and Defense Department with the ability to exempt portions of their departments, which VA Secretary Doug Collins used to protect unions who had filed “no or few grievances” against the department or otherwise challenged the Trump administration’s workforce policies.
When Trump signed a new executive order last month banning unions at more federal agencies, he reopened the ability for Collins and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to exempt more labor groups from the bargaining ban. The deadline for the officials to do so is Friday.
In a letter last week, the presidents of the International Association of Machinists, National Federation of Federal Employees, National Association of Government Employees, American Federation of Government Employees, National Nurses United and the Service Employees International Union urged Collins to restore employees’ union rights immediately.
“You should issue this order without delay,” the unions wrote. “The president’s initial determination excluding VA employees from collective bargaining on the basis of national security was an overreach. President Trump moved quickly on his far-reaching agenda and this administration has pledged to fix things if the results were not as intended. VA employees are not performing ‘national security work’ as a ‘primary function’ of their job.”
While the Trump administration has touted banning unions as a necessary tool to make agencies more efficient and responsive to the public, the unions said that the last six months has shown it to have the opposite effect.
“The last few months have shown that excluding VA employees from collective bargaining interferes with mission delivery,” the letter states. “The VA’s staffing shortage has more than doubled in the few months since the VA no longer recognized unions. That is in large part because employee morale has plummeted. Taking away union rights left employees feeling devalued and disrespected.”
Trump’s union-busting executive orders are still the subject of a myriad of legal challenges from federal employee unions. Though unions have secured multiple injunctions blocking their implementation, those injunctions themselves have been blocked by federal appeals court, though one bench is preparing to hear arguments about whether to reconsider that decision.
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