Thousands of employees across the Department of Health and Human Services are set to lose their collective bargaining rights in a move that American Federation of Government Employees national president Everett Kelley called “illegal and immoral.”
The Department of Health and Human Services has signaled its intent to de-recognize employee unions, a move that would take away collective bargaining rights for thousands of its staff.
In a statement to the Associated Press on Friday, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said the move “ensures that HHS resources and personnel are fully focused on safeguarding the health and security of the American people.” HHS will also reclaim office space and equipment that had been allotted for union activities.
In a statement on Friday, Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees called the move “illegal and immoral,” one that is a “disservice to every American who benefits from the programs and services our members deliver.” The Federation in its statement also asserted that unions are not obstacles to health and emergency responses. Instead, “they are what ensures that CDC and NIOSH [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] maintain a stable, experienced, and supported workforce.”
President Donald Trump in March issued an executive order that stripped collective bargaining rights from federal employees under the guise of national security. A few weeks later, a DC district court blocked the order, finding that some key parts of it were “unlawful” and could not be applied to several government agencies. In May, however, an appellate court reversed this lower ruling, allowing Trump’s executive order to move forward.
Another judge in June, this time from the Northern District of California, also ruled against the government and blocked the order, noting that while the court “has no intention in this order of second-guessing the President’s national security determinations,” a claim of national security concerns does not “automatically negate the Constitution, particularly with respect to the First Amendment.”
Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals said that the executive order can remain in force while legal challenges proceed.
The termination of employee bargaining rights at HHS comes just days after hundreds of current and former employees at the agency blasted Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in an open letter, placing at least part of the blame on his shoulders for the shooting at the CDC’s main campus earlier this month. “The violent August 8th attack on CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta was not random,” the authors wrote, noting that it came “amid growing mistrust in public institutions, driven by politicized rhetoric that has turned public health professionals from trusted experts into targets of villainization—and now, violence.”
Kennedy, according to the letter, is “complicit” in this mistrust “by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information.”
