Court Tells Bush ‘Wrong!’ on Attack on Defense Workers

by Mike Hall, Feb 27, 2006

For the second time, a federal judge has taken a legal 2×4 upside the Bush administration’s plans to strip federal workers of their collective bargaining rights. Maybe this time the message will get through.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmett G. Sullivan ruled Feb. 27 that the Defense Department’s so-called National Security Personnel System (NSPS) fails to “ensure even minimal collective bargaining rights” for the department’s more than 700,000 workers. He blocked the department from imposing the new rules.

Last August, in a decision on similar Bush-proposed workplace rules for the 160,000 workers in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said, “The regulations fail in their obligation to ensure collective bargaining rights to DHS employees.”

Federal workers and their unions have been making the same argument since the Bush White House announced its plans in 2004 to make sweeping changes in federal personnel practices.

“From the very start, this so-called National Security Personnel System was a sham,” says Greg Junemann, president of the Professional and Technical Engineers.

The new personnel rules would scrap decades of federal civil service laws. The rules would replace civil service pay grades and promotion rules and limit the issues that can be discussed in contract bargaining by taking pay and work rules off the table.

In the Defense Department decision, “Judge Sullivan’s ruling ratifies our charges that the National Security Personnel System is an effort to radically undermine the rights of more than 700,000 civilian workers and it is a template for what this White House would like to establish for both private and public sector workers,” says Ron Ault, president of the AFL-CIO Metal Trades Department, which represents many of the three dozen unions in the United DoD Workers Coalition (UDWC).

AFGE President John Gage says he hopes the Defense Department will “not appeal the judge’s decision, but give up the quest to change the personnel system.”

In both court cases, the unions of the UDWC had filed lawsuits to block the proposed personnel rules. The Defense Department has not announced if it will appeal Sullivan’s ruling. Homeland Security did appeal Collyer’s decision and arguments are set for April 6 before a three-judge appeals court panel.

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