As Donald Trump continues his drive to cull the federal workforce and consolidate his power, labor unions have emerged as some of his staunchest opponents.
Unions are battling the administration in federal courtrooms nationwide, after filing dozens of lawsuits to try to halt attempts to shed hundreds of thousands of government employees, strip collective bargaining rights from over a million workers, and gut some federal agencies.
On Wednesday, they made a significant breakthrough: Judge Susan Illston, of the US district court’s northern district of California, granted a temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s latest mass layoffs from the government shutdown.
Such lawsuits are designed to stand up to “the growing autocratic threat we are seeing in the United States each day”, said Skye Perryman, CEO and president of the legal group Democracy Forward, which has represented unions in a string of cases, including their bid to block Trump’s latest layoffs.
“In the United States, working people and organized labor have been responsible for stopping abuses of power and igniting generational change,” she told the Guardian. “In light of this history, it is no surprise that working people and organized labor are playing such a role in this time against the harmful actions of this administration.”
Union leaders and prominent Democrats have accused Trump of overseeing unprecedented attacks on workers’ rights, and of being the “most anti-labor, anti-worker administration” in the history of the US.
“Each lawsuit demonstrates the same thing in each filing,” Suzanne Summerlin, a labor attorney in Washington DC, said. “A government willing to break the law, just to see if anyone will stop it.
“It’s governance by impulse, not principle – like handing the keys to the country over to a group of 12-year-olds,” she said. “They’ll keep going and testing the limits until an adult stops them.”
“What’s encouraging is that unions working with democracy organizations are stepping up to hold this lawlessness to account,” Summerlin added. “They’re defending not just the rights of federal workers, but the idea of a professional, nonpartisan civil service that serves the American people, not a political party. That fight is essential to protecting democracy itself.”
According to a tracker by the non-profit law journal Just Security, at least 30 lawsuits have been filed by unions against the Trump administration. Here are three of the most significant areas they are trying to push back.
1. Attacks on labor
In March, Trump issued an executive order, invoking national security, which sought to rescind collective bargaining rights for two-thirds of federal workers: over a million employees. In August, Trump issued another executive order, seeking to rescind collective bargaining agreements at additional federal agencies.
“President Trump supports constructive partnerships with unions who work with him; he will not tolerate mass obstruction,” the first order stated. Everett Kelley, president of American Federation of Government Employees (Afge), called it the “single most aggressive action taken by the federal government against organized labor in US history”.
Six labor unions filed a lawsuit challenging the order, which unions argue is unlawful. “It’s clear that this order is punishment for unions who are leading the fight against the administration’s illegal actions in court – and a blatant attempt to silence us,” Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the US, said in a statement at the time.
Liz Shuler. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
The unions initially won a sweeping injunction, only for this to be overturned by a federal appeals court. The administration promptly stripped hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their union contracts in August. Court proceedings in the case are continuing.
In June, a federal judge ruled that the Transportation Security Administration must revive its collective bargaining agreement, at least while a legal challenge works its way through the courts, after the Department of Homeland Security cancelled it in March. A trial has been set for 2026.
2. Workforce cuts
The Trump administration has tried to drastically reduce 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 taking.
“Both people who took the deferred resignation program offer and those who stayed were forced to choose between two bad options,” said a former Department of Energy employee who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.
The employee accepted the deferred resignation program as their maternity leave ended because they were fearful of potential layoffs at the agency. “I feel a lot of grief for my job, the great people I worked with who have also left, and my dreams for the projects I was so excited to lead,” they said.
Unions have filed a string of lawsuits to challenge initial firings, reclassifications, and resignation program. Litigation in these cases continues.
3. Dismantling agencies
Beyond efforts to dismiss, or drive out, many employees from the federal government, Trump’s administration has also sought to break apart some of the agencies they work for.
Organizations such as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Niosh), the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, Voice of America, USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) have all been in the sights of the White House.
A blizzard of lawsuits were filed by unions in a bid to slow, and ultimately stop, these attempts. “The Trump administration’s rash move to decimate the Niosh workforce is not only unlawful but shortsighted,” Bonnie Robin-Vergeer, Public Citizen Litigation Group attorney, said in May. “In bypassing Congress and effectively shutting down the agency, [the administration] violated federal laws and exceeded its power under the constitution.”
Many of the targeted departments remain open, for now, although large numbers of their employees are on leave, pending the ultimate outcome of legal battles over their future. Although unions initially won an injunction preventing Trump from gutting the CFPB, this was overturned by a judge by a DC circuit panel in August. The unions are seeking to appeal.
The White House did not comment on the lawsuits. An automated response said the press office “may experience delays” during the federal government shutdown, and took the opportunity to blame Democrats for both parties’ failure to reach a deal to reopen the government.
“Of the scores of lawsuits that have been filed since January, for the most part, the unions that have filed them, or the individual employees that have filed them, have won in the trial court,” said Catherine Fisk, Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong professor of law at the University of California Berkeley. “In many cases, if they’ve gotten to a court of appeals, they have won there, they have prevailed in making the preliminary showing necessary to get the court to order the government to stop what it’s doing and to reinstate the workers while the case gets litigated.”
Fisk pointed to the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which regulates every aspect of hirings, promotions, discipline, and firings of federal civilian employees.
On the temporary injunction blocking Trump from firing federal employees during the government shutdown, Robin Tholin of Altshuler Berzon, a law firm representing plaintiffs Afge and Afscme in the lawsuit, said: “The law plainly does not permit this administration’s scheme to order mass firings across the federal government for their own political advantage, including by illegally keeping federal employees working during a government shutdown to carry out the firing of their fellow employees.”
Once these cases have made their way through the lower courts, the question turns to what happens next – or, as Fisk put it, “how far the US supreme court is going to go in allowing the Trump administration to do whatever it wants”.
The supreme court overruled two injunctions initially won by Afge, which had temporarily halted large-scale reductions of the federal workforce while lawsuits worked their way through lower courts.
No one is sure what will happen next. “I can’t hazard a guess on whether the majority of the court is prepared to declare civil service protections for federal civilian employees unconstitutional,” said Fisk. “It seems shocking, because there has been civil service protection for federal civilian employees since the mid-late 19th century.”
