Anthony Behar/Sipa USA via AP Images
TSA agents screen passengers at JFK’s Terminal 5 two days before the official start of the Thanksgiving holiday, November 26, 2024, in New York.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order giving collective-bargaining rights to federal employees, though they were not permitted to strike, nor, as a result of the 2018 Supreme Court Janus decision, are they compelled to pay dues to their union. In the more than half a century since Kennedy signed that order, the vast majority of federal employees have voted to form unions and have won enforceable contracts with the government. Nor has the government ever negated a contract it had signed—until last Friday.
On Friday, Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, told the roughly 45,000 airport security screeners (of both passengers and their luggage) who work for the Transportation Security Administration that it would no longer honor its contract with their union, which the government signed last year and was to be in effect until 2031. That contract gave the nation’s airport screeners the right to parental, sick, and bereavement leave, and also raised their wages to levels comparable to the wages of other federal employees with similar jobs.
One of the ostensible reasons Homeland Security gave for its going back on its word is that the 193 security screeners are on leave to the union to represent the screeners when they have issues on the job. The vast majority of those union reps work in the field, covering the 430 U.S. airports where federal screeners are employed. Somehow, having 193 worker representatives covering work issues at 430 vitally important worksites doesn’t strike me as excessive, much less grounds for unilaterally abrogating a contract that the government is legally obligated to honor.
There are two regulatory bodies charged with adjudicating disputes between federal employees and the government: the Federal Labor Relations Authority and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Not coincidentally, however, Trump has fired Democratic members of both those boards, effectively leaving them incapable of ruling on any cases brought before them. These boards, like the National Labor Relations Board, were established by Congress to have members serving for fixed terms who can’t be terminated mid-term by a president save for misconduct, which hasn’t been alleged in any such Trump firings. For that reason, one federal district judge temporarily reinstated one such member earlier last week, just as another reinstated Gwynne Wilcox, an NLRB member whom Trump had fired, to her seat on that board.
The move by Trump’s Homeland Security Department is the single most anti-worker and anti-union presidential action since Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981.
If the screeners’ union (the American Federation of Government Employees) proves unable to access either of those federal employee boards, it will doubtless go to the courts. As the union that represents the lion’s share of federal employees, AFGE has been at the forefront of efforts to win court orders stopping the wholesale firing of federal workers by Elon Musk and his henchmen (more accurately, henchboys). That might be one reason why Trump decided to go after its members.
The move by Trump’s Homeland Security Department is the single most anti-worker and anti-union presidential action since Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981. As federal employee strikes have been illegal since 1947, Reagan’s action was within the law, but ran counter to the precedent established a decade earlier by his Republican predecessor Richard Nixon, who’d allowed postal workers who’d gone out on a wildcat strike to return to their jobs. That shift signaled the movement of the Republican Party to a more hard-right stance on labor issues, as well as the declining clout of the union movement. That movement now runs beyond Nixon-to-Reagan; it now proceeds on to Trump, whose unilateral nullification of a contract could well prove to be illegal, as Reagan’s firings were not.
Reagan’s mass firing of the air traffic controllers marked a turning point in American labor relations. As Georgetown University’s Joe McCartin documented in his superb history, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America, it prompted the CEOs of numerous corporations to fire their own striking workers, even though such firings usually violated the National Labor Relations Act (though the penalties for such violations were negligible). The long-running descent of the share of American workers in unions accelerated sharply, and the gaps between the rise in workers’ incomes and the rise in the productivity gains they’d produced widened precipitously, as did the gap between workers’ incomes and shareholders’ incomes.
Today, the rate of unionization is so low—just below 10 percent among all workers and just below 6 percent among private-sector workers—that there’s not much room for it to descend any lower. Ironically, unions’ approval rating, at a little more than 70 percent, hasn’t been this high since the 1960s, and towers above the approval ratings of corporations, the government, and Donald Trump. Employers’ determination to crush unionization drives, however, is also at a near all-time high, with Amazon and other companies now in court contesting the constitutionality of the 90-year-old National Labor Relations Act.
But even if there are fewer unions left for them to bust, most corporate leaders and major investors, I’d surmise, approve of Trump’s nullifying the contract with security screeners. In an article that The New York Times ran last week, financier Steven Rattner noted with some alarm that many of his Wall Street peers were privately pleased at Trump’s performance, though most were not in a position to say so publicly. They’re enamored, Rattner reported, of his deregulation of business, of his war on woke, and of his proposed renewal of massive tax cuts for the rich. I’d be surprised if they’re not now chortling over his stripping union rights and benefits away from workers.
After all, it was Wall Street that demanded that American corporations move production to countries where labor costs were way lower than they were here, so profits and share values would rise. For that matter, Wall Street has never come to terms with a unionized workforce, instead pressuring companies—if the companies needed pressure—to hike their profits, dividends, and share buybacks at workers’ expense.
Trump’s Republicans are now crowing about their success at winning working-class votes. Like cutting Medicaid benefits and eligibility, flagrant union busting, negating an agreement with workers whose work is visible to all, might just play poorly with some of the party’s newfound working-class supporters. Trump’s nullification of the screeners’ contract may not be headline news, and may not be reported at all on Fox “News” or right-wing social media. But if some of those screeners walked off the job—at no small risk to their livelihoods, but telling the news media how Trump had gone back on the government’s agreement with them—America would be compelled to take notice.
