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Washington, D.C.—The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today won an historic legal victory for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees when a federal appeals court not only upheld, but significantly broadened a lower court’s decision declaring that wide portions of a regressive personnel system are illegal and cannot be implemented.

Today’s decision is the third time NTEU, acting as lead counsel for all DHS unions, has successfully challenged the personnel regulations which would have severely restricted the collective bargaining rights of DHS employees. A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that the DHS scheme is a “flagrant departure” from the meaning of collective bargaining and therefore is “utterly unreasonable.” The appeals court expanded the lower court’s ruling by holding that the regulations illegally restrict bargaining to “employee-specific grievances,” preserving a critical voice for employees on important workplace issues, including, among other things, procedures for assigning overtime.

“The appeals court ruling holding the labor relations provisions entirely illegal should effectively end DHS’s effort to impose these unjust and unnecessary rules that would constrict employees’ workplace rights, deny them fair treatment and further erode their morale,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley. “The bottom line is that working against the best interests of your employees is never a winning strategy.”

She added: “With this landmark victory, it should now be clear that any effort to strip a meaningful workplace voice from federal employees will fail.”

The decision upholds an injunction, issued last August and reinforced by a follow-up decision in October, by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

That decision said, among other things, the DHS regulations exceed the authority given to the department in the Homeland Security Act (HSA), which created DHS. That law requires DHS to ‘ensure’ that employees retain their collective bargaining rights. The appeals court agreed with NTEU that a system in which an agency can ignore its negotiated agreements not only represents a “flagrant departure from the norms of collective bargaining,” it also “defies common sense.”

On the key issue of the department’s attempt to severely limit the scope of bargaining, the court said: “We know of no contemporary system of collective bargaining that limits the scope of bargaining to employee-specific personnel matters, as does the (DHS) HR system, and the government cites to none.” It added that the regulations on scope of bargaining would “render collective bargaining meaningless, and therefore, are invalid.”

The appeals court also rejected DHS efforts to dictate a new role and set of procedures to the Federal Labor Relations Authority, an independent agency, ruling those efforts “an exercise of power far outside the Department’s statutory authority.”

If the illegal DHS regulations had been implemented, President Kelley said, they would have “posed a serious threat to the ability of DHS employees to perform their vital national security jobs effectively.” She called for an immediate meeting with DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff to begin the process of developing a personnel system that will serve the nation without needlessly trouncing on the rights of employees.

“Frontline employees are DHS’s best resources and the regulations are so regressive that it would have been difficult for DHS to retain its professional, skilled workforce,” Kelley said.

In addition to DHS’s court setbacks, the NTEU leader noted pointedly that the House of Representatives has cut significantly the administration’s funding request for implementation of its personnel and pay system, known as MaxHR. The House voted a mere $14.7 million for that purpose in 2007—less than the $29.7 million appropriated for it in fiscal 2006 and far less than the more than $71 million sought by the administration for the coming fiscal year.

“It’s high time the administration abandoned this losing proposition,” Kelley said, adding that the appeals court decision “clearly has significant implications” for the administration’s efforts to remake civil service rules throughout the government.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 federal workers in 30 agencies and departments, including 15,000 in DHS’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection.