Trump administration sues to invalidate dozens of union contracts

By Daniel Wiessner

(Reuters) -The administration of President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit claiming that dozens of labor contracts between unions and federal agencies are invalid because they impede Trump's abilities to purge the federal workforce and protect national security.

The departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and four other agencies sued in Waco, Texas, federal court late on Thursday seeking a ruling that an executive order issued by Trump earlier in the day excluding certain agencies from collective bargaining requirements allows them to cancel existing contracts.

The agencies sued the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal worker union with more than 800,000 members, and about three dozen of its local affiliates.

The local unions represent thousands of workers employed by the eight agencies at military bases, veterans' hospitals and other government facilities, mainly in Texas.

The agencies claim the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden entered into collective bargaining agreements with the AFGE in the months before Trump took office to block him from firing federal workers en masse and pursuing other priorities.

"The President and his senior Executive Branch officials cannot afford to be obstructed by CBAs that micromanage oversight of the federal workforce and impede performance accountability," the agencies said.

Some of the contracts allow employees to continue working remotely, delegate decision-making "to unaccountable private arbitrators," and limit the power of the president and agency heads to promptly identify and address poor performance, the agencies said in the lawsuit.

AFGE President Everett Kelley in a statement responding to Trump's executive order called it a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of public employees based solely on their union membership. Kelley said the union "is preparing immediate legal action" in response to the order.

"AFGE isn't going anywhere. Our members have bravely served this nation, often putting themselves in harm's way, and they deserve far better than this blatant attempt at political punishment," Kelley said.

The union on Friday did not immediately have a comment on the lawsuit. AFGE has filed several lawsuits against the Trump administration, including challenges to the mass firings of recently-hired federal workers and the termination of collective bargaining rights for nearly 50,000 Transportation Security Administration officers.

The Trump administration has terminated or attempted to fire tens of thousands of workers from the 2.3 million-member federal workforce, and has said that more mass layoffs are coming. But about 30% of federal workers are unionized, and bargaining agreements make it difficult to fire those people or change their working conditions.

Unlike their private-sector counterparts, federal worker unions cannot bargain over wages, benefits, or the classification of employees, and federal employees are barred by law from going on strike.

Agencies can disapprove collective bargaining agreements for a short period after they are ratified by unions, but that period has expired for the contracts at issue in the lawsuit.

The agencies that sued say the CBAs they are targeting are no longer valid in light of Trump's executive order. The order exempts a number of agencies from collective bargaining that, Trump said, "have as a primary function of intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work."

The other agencies involved in the lawsuit include the Department of Agriculture, Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Social Security Administration.

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