Donald Trump Wants To Destroy Federal Labor Unions

Over his first 100 days, the president has posed a greater threat to collective bargaining in government than Ronald Reagan’s landmark strikebreaking.

Federal labor unions find themselves in a fight for survival just 100 days into Donald Trump’s presidency.

The new administration has attacked collective bargaining as it fires workers and shrinks or eliminates federal departments by fiat. It has tried to gut key agencies that enforce labor rights for federal workers. It has ignored union contracts negotiated by Trump’s predecessor. And it has moved to shut off paycheck dues deduction in order to starve unions of their funding.

In its most brazen move, the White House has tried to strip union protections from up to 1 million federal employees, on the dubious grounds that they work primarily in “national security.” If the administration succeeds, collective bargaining agreements could be thrown out at more than a dozen agencies and departments, making it much easier to fire people without due process.

According to labor historian Joseph McCartin, Trump’s actions could turn out more destructive to federal unionism than Ronald Reagan’s infamous breaking of the air-traffic controllers’ strike in 1981, a monumental defeat that still hangs over the U.S. labor movement.

“I think, like all of us, [the unions] have been caught by surprise by the extent of the aggression, and just how far the administration has gone,” said McCartin, who wrote a book on the PATCO strike and teaches at Georgetown University. “I don’t think anybody understood where this was going to be at this point.”