US judge blocks Trump from ending union bargaining for many federal workers

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By Daniel Wiessner

(Reuters) -A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the administration of President Donald Trump from stripping hundreds of thousands of federal employees of the ability to unionize and collectively bargain over working conditions.

Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman in Washington, D.C., blocked an executive order Trump issued in March from being implemented pending the outcome of a lawsuit by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents about 160,000 federal employees.

The union says Trump’s order, which exempted more than a dozen federal agencies from obligations to bargain with unions, violates federal workers’ labor rights and the U.S. Constitution.

Eliminating collective bargaining would make it easier for agencies to alter working conditions and fire or discipline workers. And it could prevent federal worker unions from challenging Trump administration initiatives in court.

Friedman, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, said he would issue an opinion explaining his decision in the next few days.

Trump in the executive order excluded agencies from collective bargaining obligations that he said “have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.” It applies to the Justice, State, Defense, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services departments, among other agencies.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly called the ruling “absurd” in a statement and said the Trump administration would immediately appeal.

“Employees in certain agencies that deal with national security, intelligence, counterintelligence, or investigative functions may not unionize to slow or halt the President’s agenda,” Kelly said.

NTEU President Doreen Greenwald in a statement said the decision was “a victory for federal employees, their union rights and the American people they serve.”

Trump’s order affects about 75% of the roughly 1 million federal workers represented by unions, according to court filings. NTEU has said the order applies to about 100,000 of its members and that it is losing $2 million a month in dues that agencies are no longer deducting from workers’ paychecks.

It significantly expanded an existing exception from collective bargaining for workers with duties affecting national security, such as certain employees of the CIA and FBI.

On the same day Trump issued the order, eight federal agencies filed a lawsuit against dozens of local union affiliates seeking to invalidate existing union contracts covering thousands of workers.

The Treasury Department has filed a separate case against NTEU seeking to invalidate a bargaining agreement that covers Internal Revenue Service employees nationwide.

NTEU in its lawsuit says none of the agencies covered by the order are primarily involved in intelligence or national security work. The union claims Trump issued the order to punish federal-sector unions that have sued over his policies and in some cases stopped them from taking effect.

Friedman, during a hearing in the case on Thursday, seemed to agree that the order was an act of retaliation against unions. He told a government lawyer that Trump “is willing to be kind to those that work with him, but those that have sued him … he’s not going to bargain with.”

Trump’s order is also being challenged in a separate lawsuit in California federal court by the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal worker union with more than 800,000 members.

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot, Alexia Garamfalvi and Diane Craft)