Unions representing thousands of employees at the National Weather Service and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, both under the Commerce Department, filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump over his executive order last week expanding the list of federal agencies to strip them of collective bargaining rights.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, called Trump’s executive order the near completion of “union busting” in the civil service.
In his EO, Trump ended collective bargaining with federal unions representing agencies with national security missions. Trump’s EO stated that “weather and climate data that inform the weather forecasting used to plan U.S. military deployments. Weather forecasts have long been critical factor [sic] in the success or failure of military operations,” the EO said.
However, the National Weather Service Employees Organization (NWSEO) and the Patent Office Professional Association (POPA) asserted that few, if any, of their members are involved in national security. Instead, they say it’s retaliation for speaking out against Trump’s policies.
“The president did not exclude those agencies or employees ‘with unions who work with him’ politically and who do not oppose his efforts to neuter the civil service or, as he disparagingly calls it, ‘the deep state,'” the lawsuit states.
“Basically, the president’s threat didn’t work with these two unions and the others that have recently been impacted. And I think that’s why he’s continued to expand the list,” Richard Hirn, general counsel for NWSEO and POPA, told Federal News Network. “If letting these people have collective bargaining really was a threat to national security to begin with, they would have been covered in the first group.”
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