Along with its efforts to privatize jobs across the board, the Bush administration is rushing headlong to strip civil service rights and collective bargaining rights from many federal workers.

Under a plan pushed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, some 700,000 Department of Defense workers could lose their workplace rights. The changes in the department’s personnel system would allow the secretary of defense to decide whether department workers have collective bargaining rights, the right to join a union, due process and appeal rights. It would even allow Rumsfeld and his successors to implement a new pay system giving supervisors the power to determine if workers get raises.

In September, Defense Department workers across the country joined a grassroots campaign to build public opposition to the plan, concluding with a national call-in day to Congress urging lawmakers to scrap the Rumsfeld plan, which is now part of the fiscal year 2004 Defense Authorization bill.

“This is a chance to turn back the war this administration is waging against the federal civilian workforce,” AFGE President John Gage says of the drive to stop the plan.

Bush is waging that war on several fronts. Last year he took away civil service protections and collective bargaining rights of 170,000 workers in the newly created Department of Homeland Security, and allowed the head of the new federal Transportation Security Administration to ban its 60,000 workers from exercising their freedom to join a union. In September, AFGE appealed a federal judge’s ruling upholding the security administration’s action, and that case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

"Let’s Roll" Anti-Unionism
In February, the Bush administration took union representation from 1,000 workers at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. In January 2002, Bush issued an executive order revoking the union representation for workers in the Justice Department’s U.S. attorney’s offices, the Criminal Division, the U.S. National Central Bureau of Interpol, the National Drug Intelligence Center, and the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review.

“Collective bargaining rights are in jeopardy for all federal workers whose jobs are subject to outsourcing,” says Sarah Lawrence College government professor Priscilla Murolo. “Given the outrageous union-busting at the Department of Homeland Security, no one can doubt that Bush appointees are likely to favor outsourcing bids from non-union firms or firms engaged in union-busting.”

America@Work, Oct.-Nov. 2003 issue