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Washington, D.C.—Acting as lead counsel for all of the Department of Homeland Security’s unions, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) tomorrow will ask a federal appeals court to uphold two district court decisions which enjoined DHS from stripping the department’s workers of hard-won civil service workplace rights and protections that have covered them for many years.

The case carries far-reaching implications for the federal workforce and the nation.

A key issue in NTEU v. Chertoff, to be argued at 9:30 a.m. before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is whether DHS violated the Homeland Security Act (HSA) requirement that DHS ‘ensure’ its employees have the right to bargain collectively when creating its new human resources system.

DHS, which appealed the case, is seeking to put in place regressive personnel rules—blocked by the district court—that would severely restrict employees’ collective bargaining, due process and appeal rights. Further, the administration has said it wants to use the DHS regulations, and similar rules it has proposed for employees of the Department of Defense (DoD), as models to spread throughout the federal workplace. The two departments employ nearly half of the federal workforce.

“The Bush administration has made it clear that its vision of personnel reform involves a federal workplace where employees’ voices are silenced and employees’ rights are diminished,” NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said. “Despite mounting legal losses, this administration continues to pursue these discredited systems.”

“We have said from the beginning of the DHS litigation that the impact of this case will extend far beyond DHS, to every federal agency and every federal worker,” said President Kelley. “If these regulations go forward, that would be a major step backward not just for federal workers, but for our nation’s security and ultimately for the delivery of government services to the American public,” she said.

In prevailing earlier in this case, NTEU first secured an injunction from federal district court in Washington preventing DHS from moving forward its new rules on the eve of implementation—and then defeated a government effort to have the district court narrow the scope of its injunction. Rather than meeting with NTEU to work out acceptable personnel rules that would protect employee rights and enhance the agency’s ability to perform its mission, DHS has continued to press the matter in court.

In comprehensive legal briefs, NTEU, which filed a cross-appeal on aspects of the lower court’s ruling that did not fully adopt NTEU’s position, argued that the DHS rules far overstep the authority Congress granted to it in HSA.

The rules, NTEU told the appeals court, would authorize DHS managers and supervisors to nullify collective bargaining agreements on a whim; allow DHS to unilaterally take matters off the bargaining table; eliminate virtually all negotiations over daily working conditions; and assign a new management-controlled body the responsibility for resolving bargaining disputes without the involvement of neutral third-parties.

The NTEU leader added: “The first, most serious and longest-lasting impact of the rules sought to be imposed on the dedicated men and women of DHS would be to undercut employee morale to a degree that would significantly erode our nation’s security. To secure our homeland, we need to attract and retain the best law enforcement professionals and then treat them as such.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments, including some 15,000 in CBP.