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Washington, D.C.—Regulations seeking to implement a new human resources management system at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fail to ensure employees’ right to bargain collectively, and the appeals court should affirm a district court decision invalidating them, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said today.

In its final legal brief prior to the scheduled April 6 oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, NTEU, serving as lead counsel in the case, called on the court to uphold the decisions of the lower court which enjoined implementation of the rules—and which then rejected an agency effort to have the injunction narrowed. NTEU also argued that the district court decision should have gone further to specifically invalidate the regulations restricting the scope of bargaining and establishing a management-controlled board to resolve labor-management disputes.

“The government cannot seriously dispute that the regulations prohibit all meaningful negotiations over day-to-day working conditions” in clear violation of the Homeland Security Act (HSA), NTEU said in its brief. HSA established DHS; in it, Congress definitively said the agency was obligated to “ensure” employees’ collective bargaining rights.

“Any obligation (in the DHS regulations) to bargain exists on paper only because DHS has the authority to take more matters off the bargaining table and to repudiate agreements by fiat,” NTEU told the appeals court. Further, the union brief said, the regulations fail because they assign responsibility for resolving disputes to an internal board that is required “to give DHS’s determination ‘great deference,’” thus depriving employees of the objective review inherent in any and all collective bargaining systems.

In its decision striking down the regulations as invalid, the lower federal court relied heavily on the concept that collective bargaining cannot exist where one party—in this instance, DHS—can unilaterally negate an agreed-upon contract simply by issuing a directive.

“The previous decisions in this case, and today’s decision in the Department of Defense case, impose significant barriers to the administration’s plan to extend similar, regressive personnel rules throughout the federal government,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley, adding “they also vindicate NTEU’s consistent argument that the White House has clearly overstepped its authority in attempting to take away longstanding federal employee rights.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments, including 14,000 in CBP—making NTEU the largest union representing CBP employees.