This article is a joint publication of The American Prospect and Workday Magazine, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.
Jason was elected to represent unionized workers at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in New York state. But on August 8, he got the same notice as 400,000 colleagues across the VA: their union contracts were being abruptly eliminated in response to a Trump administration executive order. It was a Friday, and by the following Tuesday he had to clear out the union local’s office, which was housed in a VA facility.
“I had to have a moving company show up, box up all of our equipment, all of our files, all the employee files,” says Jason, who requested I use a pseudonym and not identify his facility or specific profession to protect him and his colleagues from retaliation. That Tuesday morning, when he showed up, the locks had already been changed, he says. “It was unnerving, unsettling. Our management was meeting with the employees, telling them, ‘The union’s gone. There is no union.’”
Jason fundamentally disagrees with this assertion. Management can tear up the collective bargaining agreement, but it cannot get rid of the collective identity of workers, he says. They can still support each other, remain in communication and community, and act in solidarity on the job. Now, Jason is part of a broader effort to maintain unions, and fight back, as an unprecedented number of federal workers see their collective bargaining agreements extinguished.
In August, the Trump administration unilaterally terminated collective bargaining agreements with major labor unions at numerous federal agencies, including the VA, the EPA, the CDC, and the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. The terminations immediately canceled bargaining agreements for nearly half a million federal workers, and as the president orders more cancellations, including for another set of agencies just last week, at least 1 million federal workers will be impacted, according to labor leaders. That represents around 7 percent of all unionized workers in the United States.
“Trump’s threat to unions and working people across America is clear: ‘Fall in line or else.’”
The developments were the result of a federal appeals court overruling an injunction that had initially suspended the March 27 executive order. The merits of the case have not been ruled on, and it remains active in federal court.
In tearing up contracts, the administration is citing the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that permits the suspension of collective bargaining for national security reasons. But workers say this justification is nothing more than a pretext to violate workers’ basic rights to collectively organize. And even a White House fact sheet points to other motivations, proclaiming that “certain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda.”
“This administration’s bullying tactics represent a clear threat not just to federal employees and their unions, but to every American who values democracy and the freedoms of speech and association,” says Aimee Potter, a VA social worker based in Chicago. “Trump’s threat to unions and working people across America is clear: ‘Fall in line or else.’”
Under Jason’s former contract, his salary as union president was covered by his employer. Rather than be recalled to work, as has happened with many other local presidents, he went into retirement, and is now using his own time to perform his duties as president. “I believe all workforces should have a union,” he says. “They should have a voice. So my goal, while I’m still breathing, while I still have the capacity, is to fight for that.”
NICOLE CANTELLO STILL CONSIDERS HERSELF the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 704, even after the Trump administration eliminated Environmental Protection Agency contracts in August. “President Trump outlawed the union here at EPA by saying that we’re national security based, which is completely illegal,” she says.
She, too, has been instructed to clear out the union office. And changes have already been made in the workplace. “If there’s a disciplinary action or if there’s an investigation of conduct, we can’t be in those meetings anymore, protecting the employee. If they do something like whistleblowing and they get retaliation, we won’t be able to represent them in those circumstances,” she says. The union can no longer file grievances, but the local is still representing them, still in touch, and still committed to acting collectively to address workplace issues.
Since taking office, Trump has severely weakened the EPA by cutting staff and dramatically rolling back its regulations and powers, including its authority to regulate the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change. As the Prospect recently reported, EPA management has told employees to seek prior approval for union activities even on off-duty time.
Even with the union, workers faced retaliation. Earlier this summer, 140 EPA employees were put on investigatory leave, because they signed an open letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin expressing concern that the administration is creating a “culture of fear” for workers, abandoning vulnerable communities served by the EPA, and “ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters.” The letter says, “Your decisions and actions will reverberate for generations to come. EPA under your leadership will not protect communities from hazardous chemicals and unsafe drinking water, but instead will increase risks to public health and safety.”
Related: A Federal Appellate Court Finds the NLRB to Be Unconstitutional
Justin Chen, the president of the AFGE Council 238, which represents about 8,000 workers at the EPA, told me that last Friday, about 10 people “were either fired as probationary employees or issued notices of proposed removal if they were career conditional employees” in retaliation for signing that letter.
“If the union isn’t around to defend those people when they sign that letter of dissent,” Cantello says, “no one’s going to speak out.”
When I asked the EPA to respond to the concerns and allegations in this piece, a spokesperson told me over email, “EPA is working to diligently implement President Trump’s Executive Orders with respect to AFGE, including ‘Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs,’ in compliance with the law.”
“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public that was clearly expressed at the ballot box last November,” the EPA spokesperson continued.
But Cantello says, “The First Amendment goes to the fact that you can disagree with someone’s actions, and you don’t have to fall in line with the political position of anyone, right? That’s the whole point. So this idea that the Americans elected this administration does not—should not—influence whether or not someone has a First Amendment right.”
POTTER WORKS FOR A VA MEDICAL CENTER in Chicago, where she specializes in opioid overdose prevention. The Trump administration was already gunning to cut harm reduction programs that focus on addiction treatment, she says, and the administration’s cuts have stalled other vital programs, including trials for certain kinds of head and neck cancers.
The elimination of her union contract, Potter worries, is part of a larger plan to privatize veterans’ health care. (Peter Kasperowicz, press secretary for the VA, told me that concerns about privatization are a “far-left canard.”) When workers don’t have a union, it makes it that much easier to get rid of jobs and ship off services to the private sector. Without addiction treatment programs like hers, Potter says, “people would die.”
“It’s been tough because the administration was able to beat unions to the punch,” she says. Potter is a steward and treasurer for her local, and has been “educating people that just because the collective bargaining agreement was canceled doesn’t mean we don’t have a union.”
Conditions have grown more difficult, Potter says. VA workers who are part of AFGE have a national contract, and they negotiated an additional four weeks for parental leave. Now, parents can no longer get that time. Potter knows moms out on leave right now who will get less time with their newborns as a result.
Asked to comment, Kasperowicz said, “That is false. Most VA employees are eligible for 12 weeks of paid parental leave in accordance with the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and this has not changed. All VA employees who are eligible for FMLA paid parental leave can even request additional leave or leave without pay.”
“If the union isn’t around to defend people, no one’s going to speak out.”
But Potter says “it is absolutely true” that moms are coming out of maternity leave sooner than anticipated. “Our collective bargaining agreement provided an additional four weeks of leave. Now workers are required to use FMLA or request additional leave,” she says. “FMLA leave is discretionary and based on a supervisor approving it, which is not the same as having it guaranteed in a contract. We have heard about mothers who were told to return to work after 12 weeks.”
Her own employer at the medical center “believes in harm reduction,” Potter says, but she worries about other parts of the country that could see cuts to programs that offer health care and social services without a requirement for sobriety. Notably, the VA contract terminations do not extend to police, firefighters, or security guards.
Potter describes a “sense of doom,” and a feeling of “constantly walking on eggshells.” Some veterans, particularly older patients, are aware of what’s happening, she says. “They say, ‘We’re worried about you. What’s going to happen to you?’”
Potter insists that termination of contracts will impact patients. Combined with long-term underfunding issues at the VA, union leaders stress that Trump’s attacks on VA workers will invariably be felt by the veterans they serve. And those patients lose the health care improvements that come with unionization. Successful union drives correlate with a decline in hospital-acquired illnesses, one study found.
“There’s less protection for those of us who are doing these services daily, so we’re going to be looking for other places to work, which then impacts the availability of services for veterans, because there aren’t enough staff to provide those services, because they will be working elsewhere,” Potter says.
Asked to comment on these concerns, Kasperowicz told me the termination of VA union contracts “is a huge win for Veterans. Because of this decision, VA staff will spend more time with Veterans, VA facilities can focus on treating Veterans instead of catering to union bosses, and VA can manage its staff according to Veterans’ needs, not union demands.”
But in an August 11 statement, AFGE President Everett Kelley said unions have been targeted by the Trump administration and Doug Collins, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, precisely because “we have opposed the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle veteran health care through the cutting of 83,000 jobs, successfully fought against the disastrous and anti-veteran recommendations from the Asset Infrastructure Review (AIR) Commission that would have shut down several rural VA hospitals and clinics, and consistently educated the American people about how private, for-profit veteran health care is more expensive and results in worse outcomes for veterans.”
“This is just the latest salvo in the battle to break the spirit of working people in this country,” National Nurses United, the largest U.S. union of registered unions, said in a press statement. “Veterans deserve nurses who are free to advocate for their care without fear of retaliation, discipline, or losing their jobs,” the union added.
Kasperowicz claims that services for veterans are improving under Trump. But in an August report for the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, Suzanne Gordon warned that “the problems of provider shortages, hospital closures, and the resulting ‘healthcare deserts’ in rural areas will be exacerbated by the Trump administration’s newly passed budget bill which follows administration cuts to the funding of research in the nation’s academic healthcare institutions.” VA patients tend to be older, poorer, and have more chronic mental and physical health problems than their non-VA counterparts, Gordon notes.
“We have lost seasoned clinicians that have not been replaced,” Potter says. “Veterans have expressed concerns about long wait times on the telephone to make appointments, because our staff have been terminated. Ask these folks, how many probationary employees were terminated and not reinstated? How many positions have been vacated and unfilled? How many of our VAs are understaffed?”
POTTER BELIEVES THERE IS A NEED for a more unified response across labor, something she is working toward not only in her union role but also as part of the Federal Unionists Network (FUN). This group calls itself an “informal association of federal unionists and our allies,” and it is working right now to maintain a sense of solidarity amid the unprecedented dissolution of union agreements.
“How powerful is it that we can support each other as workers through collective action?” says Colin Smalley, an organizer with FUN. “You know, we can come together to say to our boss, ‘What you’re doing is morally wrong. You’re on the wrong side of history.’”
Federal workers did not get the right to collectively bargain until the 1960s, and these rights weren’t strengthened until 1978 with the Civil Service Reform Act. But federal unions preceded this legal infrastructure by decades, a history that FUN is looking to now for a sense of continuity and reassurance. “There is this history of sort of informal unionism of people supporting each other, taking collective action, whether or not they were recognized by the boss,” says Smalley.
As Smalley noted in a Labor Notes article from May 8, there are numerous ways workers can fight for their rights, no matter their status under the Federal Labor Relations Act. Workers can still oppose discrimination, report dangerous conditions, stand with coworkers who face unfair discipline, and make sure workers’s compensation is properly disbursed.
Yet the reality on the ground is difficult, and conditions appear to be worsening, as federal workers face an attack many degrees more severe than former President Ronald Reagan infamously snuffing out the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981. At his hospital, Jason says, clerical staff have been answering call bells and bringing water to patients, both of which are way outside of their traditional duties. He’s been encouraging workers to get everything in writing, where possible, but acknowledges it’s challenging with no grievance procedure in place.
The last time Trump was in office, Jason’s local began creating an independent platform to communicate with workers, something his union has been encouraging for locals across the country. “We had our own website, our own email addresses, and our own personal numbers,” he says, noting that he refuses to say the current president’s name. This infrastructure allowed him to stay in touch with union members.
The local is now in a fight to keep those members engaged. “Some members are fearful, some members are angry,” says Jason. “We’re going to need those who are currently with us to understand that this may be a trying time, but they need to stay engaged. The union is still here. You still have a voice. You still have rights, and we have to fight for those.”