IN WHAT is another victory for trade unions in the United States, President Joe Biden has fired all ten of Donald Trump’s appointees to the Federal Service Impasses Panel — a powerful labour relations body set up to arbitrate and resolve dispute between federal unions and management.

Biden took out its Trump appointees in one swoop when he demanded the resignation of union busters from the panel. Eight resigned and two who refused were fired.

Trump’s appointees, all anti-union activists, had blocked the right of unions to organise and to undertake collective bargaining.

Biden’s clean sweep is seen as a step forward in ending Trump’s campaign of federal union busting.

The Federal Service Impasses Panel plays a major role in settling disputes between federal employers and unions – when unions and managers reach a stalemate at the bargaining table, the impasses panel steps in to find a solution.

Biden has made it clear that the official government policy is one of “promoting collective bargaining in the civil service and encouraging the amicable settlements of disputes.” The panel has authority to write binding and un-reviewable terms into union contracts.

Trump’s anti union appointees defied the panel’s legal obligations to remain a neutral arbiter, siding with management, imposing harsher terms and even imposing terms that management did not request like extending the length of unfavourable contracts.

Trump appointed ideological right-wing activists with extensive experience of busting unions including the leader of the avowedly anti-labour Mercatus Centre, anti-union privately funded pressure groups and anti-labour groups such as the Freedom Foundation, Americans for Fair Treatment, the Goldwater Institute, the Fund for American Studies, and the Illinois Policy Institute. Others included lawyers who specialise in union busting and some had no experience in mediation or arbitration at all.

They sided against unions at almost every occasion, empowering management to crush workers’ rights during collective bargaining.

Biden’s dismissal of the entire panel is the latest in a string of pro-union actions including appointing Marty Walsh, former mayor of Boston and former leader of the Boston area construction workers’ unions as his Labour Secretary; the appointment of Jim Fredrick of the steelworkers’ union to a key post in the health and safety executive body; appointing pro-worker members of his trade negotiating team; reversing executive orders that had limited federal unions’ ability to organise and collectively bargain along with the sacking of the legal counsel to the National Labour Relations Board.

Trump’s appointees to the Impasses Panel were set for five-year terms through to 2024 and 2025. Biden decided to sack all ten in order to make replacements who are not subject to Senate approval. 

He is expected to select candidates who will fulfil their duty to reach “amicable settlements” that protect federal unions from anti-union managements.

It is anticipated that Biden will also move on the Federal Labour Relations Authority, which remains in Republican control and which has issued a series of “policy statements” granting more power to managers and restricting collective bargaining including by stripping federal unions of their right to bargain over workplace conditions during the pandemic and stopping unions from negotiating new health and safety rules to limit infections.

During his election campaign Biden said out loud “I am a union guy” and recently said it was the right of every American worker to join and organise into a union and have collective bargaining.

Tony Burke is assistant general secretary at Unite and vice-president of IndustriALL Europe.