President Donald Trump has issued an executive order aimed at ending collective bargaining privileges for government union employees. But it faces legal challenges, and as that case works its way to the Supreme Court for a decision that the president will probably lose, he and leaders in Congress are taking steps to build a coalition to minimize the fiscal damage unions inflict on federal taxpayers.
As these pages have detailed before, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, he specifically did not grant government employees the same collective bargaining rights that he wanted to create for private sector workers.
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” Roosevelt said. “It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations.”
For almost 30 years, government workers continued to perform their duties just fine without collective bargaining, but in 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988, granting them that privilege. This order was later given the force of law when Congress passed and President Jimmy Carter signed the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.
Not only did it give federal government unions the power to bargain collectively, but it forced taxpayers to pay for government union activities while government employees were on the job.
That’s right: Not only are taxpayers footing the bill for higher pay, generous benefits, and cushy working conditions that government unions secure for their members by bargaining against taxpayers’ interests, but taxpayers have the honor of paying government employees to fight for these terms while they are on the job supposedly working to serve taxpayers.
In his first term, Trump directed all federal agencies to submit data on how much time and taxpayer money is spent on federal government employees to do union work on federal time. The data were then posted to the Office of Personnel Management website. Former President Joe Biden promptly shut down the website as he took office. Trump has since issued a new memo requiring agencies to provide the data again.
But we managed to get data from 2019 before Biden shut the first project down, and according to a report by OPM, government union employees spent a total of 2,606,390 hours that year performing union tasks on government time at a cost of $163,327,235. This must stop. There are now two bills in Congress that would accomplish that in slightly different ways.
TRUMP’S RIGHTEOUS BATTLE TO END GOVERNMENT UNION COLLECTIVE BARGAINING
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA) have introduced a No Union Time on the Taxpayer’s Dime Act that would outright ban government employees from performing labor organization activities while on duty. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) instead has a Protecting Taxpayers’ Wallet Act, which would allow government employees to perform government union activities while on the job but make the unions reimburse taxpayers for its costs.
Government unions’ collective bargaining privileges should be completely banned at the federal and state levels. But while it continues, taxpayers should, at a minimum, not be required to pay for it.
