Let’s be honest. If you learned there was an American jurisdiction with
- a right-to-work law,
- a strict prohibition on all strikes,
- a prohibition on bargaining over wages, benefits, and hours, and
- binding arbitration by politically appointed officials of all negotiations impasses . . .
. . . you would probably predict that this jurisdiction has very few unions and very few union members. But you would be wrong.
These are just some of the barriers to organizing and operating unions of federal government employees. Yet, the federal sector has the third highest union density rate of any industry sector in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ union members survey, exceeded only by the state and local government sectors. According to the BLS survey, nearly 1 million non-postal federal employees are represented by one of a long list of unions in the sector, with the largest being the American Federation of Government Employees followed by the National Treasury Employees Union, the National Federation of Federal Employees (affiliated with the International Association of Machinists), and the National Association of Government Employees (affiliated with the Service Employees International Union).
Federal sector unionism offers several worthwhile lessons for those interested in worker power and worker organizing. The first lesson is perhaps the most obvious: unions can offer immense value to their members (and other workers) beyond directly negotiating higher wages, improved benefits, and reasonable work hours. Federal employee unions advocate aggressively away from the bargaining table on many of these same issues. They have lobbied Congress, the President, and his Cabinet secretaries regarding pay, employment probationary periods, expansion of collective bargaining rights, paid family and medical leave, and ending efforts to close federal facilities and eliminate jobs, among other issues. Federal employee unions also send representatives to serve on the Federal Salary Council, which advises federal decision-makers about a particularized, but very important, category of federal pay issues for employees working outside the nation’s capitol.
At the bargaining table, federal-employee unions negotiate over many of the same kinds of other working conditions that are commonly negotiated in the private sector: employee training and pathways to promotion, transfers, position descriptions, the effects of reorganizations, grievance adjustment, and work spaces, for example. Undeniably, the scope of bargaining subjects is narrower, but these issues are important to federal employees.
Among federal employee unions’ most important roles, however, is representing their members and all employees in unionized units when they are treated unfairly, abused or cheated by a manager or supervisor, forced to endure discrimination or harassment, or threatened with discipline. Federal employees have the same Weingarten rights as private-sector workers --- that is, the right to union representation in any investigatory interview. As I’ve written in the past, providing strong protections and effective representation that guards against unfairness and discrimination is a deeply undervalued benefit of unions for workers in all sectors.
A second important lesson federal-employee unions offer is the importance of persisting through difficult challenges. President Trump sought aggressively to damage the federal-employee unions as part of a larger assault on worker power. Trump issued four executive orders and other directives undermining federal employees’ unions, collective bargaining, and civil service protections. Collective bargaining between the unions and Trump-appointed agency officials was difficult or replaced entirely by unilateral imposition of management’s terms. Trump’s Federal Labor Relations Authority tried to defund the federal-employee unions by depriving them of some members’ dues and issued other anti-union decisions that were overturned by appeals courts.
There is no question Trump's efforts caused the unions pain and confusion. They certainly cost the unions resources. A few tens of thousands of members were lost. Yet, Trump failed. Like state and local government-employee unions after the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the federal-employee unions resisted and persisted. They challenged Trump. They took him to court. They protested. They rallied their members and their allies. And they turned their opposition into organizing issues for the next presidential and congressional election.
A third lesson to be learned from the federal sector is that, like the other sectors in the U.S. economy, there is room for unions to grow. Plenty of room. According to President Biden’s Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, which used data from the Office of Personnel Management (data that are different from BLS’s union members survey), only approximately one-third of federal employees working in a unionized bargaining unit were dues-paying union members. This meant that more than 835,000 federal employees were represented by a union, but do not paying dues. Undeniably, adding these employees to the dues-paying rolls would require a prodigious internal organizing effort by the unions. The Office of Personnel Management has launched a number of initiatives to give these employees readier access to the unions that represent them and thereby open these spaces to further organizing. At the end of the day, however, the organizing is up to the unions. [Disclosure: I helped create the Task Force, worked with OPM on these initiatives, and helped create the cited report.]
To put these numbers in context, if the federal-employee unions had organized only one-third of non-member employees working in existing bargaining units in 2022, this increase of about 280,000 union members would have been enough --- on it own --- to keep the national union density rate from declining. It would have doubled 2022’s total increase in union membership in the private sector and the state and local government sectors combined.
According to the Task Force, another 300,000 federal employees work in units that could be organized, but have not been yet. Units that lack a history of union representation are likely more difficult to organize. A full and more extended campaign involving substantial resources and time may be required. Also, there is a risk of failure. Organizing the non-member employees in existing bargaining units may be, at least in some cases, easier. All it takes is individual employees signing up and authorizing dues check off.
Federal-sector unionism does not get much attention outside Washington, D.C. It doesn’t grab headlines like organizing at name-brand retailers, tech employers, or food service companies. Government employment is not a large part of the discussion around our country’s economic future. Because their pay and benefits are comparatively pretty good, federal employees tend not to elicit sympathy on social media that is understandably focused on more disadvantaged and exploited workers.
Regardless, federal-government employees are workers. They are workers who perform essential services that benefit us. Like all workers, they have workplace issues, some of which are quite serious. So, while it should not need to be said, federal employees need unions that will give them a voice in their workplace just like other workers. Their unions and their efforts to organize supply the rest of us with valuable lessons about the role of unions in the workplace, the American economy, and our politics. We should learn those lessons.
