The Plot to Evict Unions from the Workplace

What if you call your union office and no one answers?
Or you’re pulled off telework but there’s no union rep to help?
Maybe you're wrongly denied a promotion and no one can fight on your behalf?

All of these things are possible when a president forbids time for federal employee union volunteers to help you at work, which is precisely the plan for the next Republican president.

Denying trained union leaders the time they need to enforce the contract is right there in the plan released by well-funded and powerful political interest groups – the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership on pages 81-82. The next Republican president would have agencies “prevent union representatives from using official time preparing or pursuing grievances.” 

If that sounds familiar it’s because it happened before when former President Trump signed the exact same order and it is designed to silence your voice in the workplace. If you were lucky enough to work at an agency where NTEU’s contract was already in place, then the order probably didn’t affect your workplace much because our contracts expressly allow NTEU chapter leaders to spend some of their workday helping their fellow employees resolve issues, fix problems, stand up to management, and insist that frontline workers be treated with dignity and respect.

But Trump’s order did disrupt certain agencies, like the Department of Health and Human Services. After brief, bad faith bargaining, management imposed a one-sided contract over NTEU’s objections, and Executive Order 13837 went into effect at HHS workplaces around the country. There were strict new limits on how much time union leaders could spend representing employees, and chapters lost access to office space, email systems or other agency resources needed to do their work.

Fortunately, President Biden rescinded this order as soon as he took office, but the idea of locking unions out of the workplace persists.

Once again, Project 2025, written by many former Trump administration officials, ponders a day when Congress will eliminate collective bargaining in the federal government and obliterate unions.

Until then, their plot is to weaken unions, give management the upper hand, silence the voices of employees and shrink the federal workforce altogether.

Visit nteu.org/threats for more information.