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Washington, D.C. — National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) President Colleen M. Kelley today announced that NTEU was victorious in its five-year battle to defeat administration efforts to create an anti-union, anti-employee labor relations system at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by severely restricting collective bargaining rights.

The victory came with today’s filing by the government in federal court that it was abandoning its efforts to install new labor relations regulations as part of its overall efforts at revamping the DHS personnel system. This successfully concludes the union’s lawsuit against DHS, part of a relentless effort by NTEU that included three court wins and multiple victories in Congress limiting funding for the regressive personnel system over the past several years.

“This is a monumental victory. It puts to rest DHS efforts to gut employees’ collective bargaining rights and give management unfettered discretion to alter fundamental conditions of employment without giving employees any say,” said President Kelley.

The overriding impact, she said, is that full collective bargaining rights will continue to be available to DHS employees, including nearly 22,000 represented by NTEU in the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection.

In the filing with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the agency said it and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) “will not revise the permanently enjoined regulations…at any time prior to the expiration of the agencies’ authority to revise those regulations.” That authority, which expires Jan. 23, 2009, was granted under the Homeland Security Act (HSA).

“HSA mandates that any personnel system in DHS ensure employees’ collective bargaining rights,” President Kelley said. “From the beginning, it was clear that DHS intended to trample on those rights. Under any circumstances, and in particular in an agency where the morale has been so low for so long, imposing such a system would have been a serious mistake.”

NTEU will continue its fight over the non-labor relations aspects of the regulations. President Kelley noted pointedly that for this fiscal year Congress refused to appropriate any money to implement the regulations, and NTEU secured congressional report language directing DHS not to use any funding for what originally was known as the MaxHR personnel system “or any follow-on personnel system.”

Congress instead directed the agency to use funds on programs “that directly address the shortcomings identified” in an OPM survey of employees that placed DHS at or near the bottom in every key category of workplace satisfaction.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.