As Donald Trump continues his campaign to eliminate the federal workforce and consolidate his power, labor unions have emerged as his most vocal opponents.
Unions are fighting management in federal courtrooms across the country, after filing dozens of lawsuits to try to stop attempts to lay off hundreds of thousands of government employees, strip more than a million workers of collective bargaining rights, and eliminate some federal agencies.
On Wednesday, they made a major breakthrough: Judge Susan Elston, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s latest mass layoffs due to the government shutdown.
Such lawsuits are designed to confront “the growing authoritarian threat we see in the United States every day,” said Skye Perryman, CEO and president of the legal group Democracy Forward, which has represented unions in a series of cases, including their attempt to block Trump’s recent layoffs.
“In the United States, working people and organized labor have been responsible for stopping the abuse of power and sparking generational change,” she told The Guardian. “In light of this history, it is not surprising that labor and organized labor would play such a role at this time against the harmful actions of this administration.”
Union leaders and prominent Democrats accused Trump of doing so Supervision Unprecedented attacks on workers’ rights, and being the “most anti-labor and anti-labor administration” in US history.
“Every lawsuit shows the same thing in every filing,” said Susan Summerlin, an employment lawyer in Washington, D.C. “A government willing to break the law, just to see if anyone will stop it.
“It’s governing by motive, not by principle — like handing the keys of the country to a bunch of 12-year-olds,” she said. “They will continue to test boundaries until an adult stops them.”
“What is encouraging is that unions working with democratic organizations are stepping up their efforts to hold this lawlessness accountable,” Summerlin added. “They are defending not only the rights of federal employees, but the idea of a professional, nonpartisan civil service that serves the American people, not a political party. This fight is essential to protecting democracy itself.”
According to the nonprofit law journal Just Security, at least 30 lawsuits have been filed foot By unions against the Trump administration. Here are three of the top areas they are trying to push back.
1. Attacks on workers
In March, Trump issued an executive order, citing national security, that sought to revoke the collective bargaining rights of two-thirds of federal workers: more than 1 million employees. In August Trump Issued Another executive order, seeking to void collective bargaining agreements at additional federal agencies.
The first: “President Trump supports constructive partnerships with the unions that work with him, and will not tolerate collective obstruction.” to request male. Everett Kelly, President of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Named It is “the most aggressive action taken by the federal government against organized labor in the history of the United States.”
Six trade unions foot A lawsuit challenges the order that unions say is illegal. “This order is clearly punishment for the unions who are leading the fight against the administration’s illegal actions in court — and a blatant attempt to silence us,” Liz Schuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest union federation in the United States, said in a statement. statement at that time.
The unions initially won a sweeping injunction, but that order was overturned by a federal appeals court. The administration immediately stripped hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their union contracts in August. Court proceedings in this case are still ongoing.
In June, a federal judge ruled that the Transportation Security Administration must do so alive Its collective bargaining agreement, at least while the legal challenge makes its way through the courts, following the Department of Homeland Security Canceled That’s in March. A trial It is set for 2026.
2. Workforce reductions
The Trump administration has tried to dramatically shrink the size of the federal government, including by reclassifying thousands of federal jobs as at-will positions, firing probationary workers, and pushing a controversial deferred resignation program, which many workers say they felt threatened and intimidated into accepting.
“Both the people who accepted the deferred resignation program offer and those who stayed had to choose between two bad options,” said a former Energy Department employee who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The employee accepted the deferred resignation program as her maternity leave expired because she was fearful of possible layoffs at the agency. “I feel very sad about my job, the wonderful people I worked with who also left, and my dreams for the projects I was so excited to lead,” they said.
The unions filed a series of lawsuits challenging the initial separation, reclassification and resignation program. Litigation In these cases it continues.
3. Dismantling agencies
Along with efforts to fire or fire many employees from the federal government, the Trump administration has also sought to dismantle some of the agencies where they work.
Organizations such as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Niosh), the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, Voice of America, USAID, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) They were all within range of the White House.
Unions have filed a storm of lawsuits in an attempt to slow and eventually stop these attempts. “The Trump administration’s reckless move to eliminate NEOSH’s workforce is not only illegal but short-sighted,” said Bonnie Robin Vergeire, an attorney for the Public Citizens Litigation Group. He said in May. “By bypassing Congress and effectively shutting down the agency, [the administration] “She violated federal laws and exceeded her authority under the Constitution.”
Many of the targeted departments remain open at present, although large numbers of their staff are on furlough, awaiting the final outcome of legal battles over their future. Although the unions initially won an injunction preventing Trump from destroying the CFPB, that order was overturned by a judge by a D.C. Circuit panel in August. The unions are seeking to appeal.
The White House has not commented on the lawsuits. The automated response said the press office “may experience delays” during the federal government shutdown, and took the opportunity to blame Democrats for the failure of both parties to reach an agreement to reopen the government.
“Of the dozens of lawsuits that have been filed since January, in most of them, the unions that filed them, or the individual employees that filed them, won in lower court,” said Katherine Fiske, a law professor at the University of California Berkeley. “In many cases, if they get to the Court of Appeal, they win there, and they prevail in making the initial offer necessary to get the court to order the government to stop what it is doing and put the workers back on their jobs while the case is litigated.”
Fisk pointed to the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which regulates every aspect of the hiring, promotions, discipline and dismissal of federal civilian employees.
Regarding the temporary order barring Trump from firing federal employees during the government shutdown, Robin Thulin of Altshuler Berzon, a law firm representing plaintiffs Afge and Afscme in the lawsuit, said: “The law clearly does not permit this administration’s scheme to order mass firings across the federal government for their own political gain, including by Keeping federal employees working illegally during a government shutdown to implement the firing of fellow employees.”
Once these cases reach the lower courts, the question turns to what happens next – or, as Fisk put it: “How far the US Supreme Court will go in letting the Trump administration do what it wants.”
The Supreme Court overturned two injunctions that Afge initially won, temporarily halting widespread cuts in the federal workforce while the lawsuits made their way through lower courts.
No one is sure what will happen next. “I can’t hazard a guess whether a majority of the court is willing to declare civil service protections for federal civilian employees unconstitutional,” Fisk said. “It seems shocking, because there have been civil service protections for federal civilian employees since the mid-late 1800s.”