One of the latest actions by President Donald Trump isn’t getting the big headlines, but it should.
On Thursday night, the president signed the “Exclusions From Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs” Executive Order (EO), which bars unions representing vast swaths of the federal workforce from engaging in collective bargaining. The EO focuses on agencies in the national security sphere, but has the net effect of neutralizing the power of the unions.
Collective bargaining is the process where employees—in this case, federal workers—band together via union organization to negotiate with their employers—in this case, the federal government—over things like wages, benefits, and, in the case of public sector unions, all sorts of perks and privileges the average, non-unionized American worker doesn’t get. Removing it neuters the unions and puts the…
