Judge Blocks Trump’s Union-Busting Plan At TSA

The Trump administration faced another legal setback on Monday when a judge temporarily blocked their plan to dissolve labor unions at a federal agency.

The White House moved in March to revoke collective bargaining rights at the Transportation Security Administration, aiming to nullify the union contract for some 47,000 airport security officers. But U.S. District Judge Marsha J. Pechman in Seattle, Washington, granted an injunction Monday at the request of the union, the American Federation of Government Employees.

Pechman, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, determined that the union was likely to prevail in its argument that the administration ran afoul of the law. She said Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, offered only a “threadbare justification” for stripping workers of their union rights, and the move appeared purely retaliatory.

“The Noem Determination appears to have been undertaken to punish AFGE and its members because AFGE has chosen to push back against the Trump Administration’s attacks [on] federal employment in the courts,” she wrote.

President Donald Trump speaks to the press in the rain after landing on Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, on May 30.

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AFGE President Everett Kelley called Pechman’s order “a crucial victory for federal workers.”

“We remain committed to ensuring our members’ rights and dignity are protected, and we will not back down from defending our members’ rights against unlawful union busting,” Kelley said in a statement.

The order means that the Trump administration must honor the union’s collective bargaining agreement for now. But the White House could still win the underlying case and succeed in having the contract tossed out.

The union-busting efforts are a key piece of President Donald Trump’s broader plan to decimate the federal workforce and end longstanding civil-service protections. In addition to trying to kill unions at TSA, Trump has tried to nullify collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of other workers at a slew of federal agencies, all in the name of “national security.”

The White House has said explicitly that it’s taking such actions at least in part because federal labor groups have stood up to the president. It noted in a “fact sheet” on revoking collective bargaining rights that federal labor groups had “declared war on President Trump’s agenda,” a statement Pechman noted in her order Monday.

“The First Amendment protects against retaliation for engaging in litigation and public criticism of the government,” she wrote.