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Washington, D.C.—Led by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), labor organizations representing tens of thousands of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees have rebutted government arguments that DHS has discretion to implement a new human resources system that lacks the core elements of collective bargaining.

In the law creating the department, the Homeland Security Act (HSA), Congress required that employees retain their rights to bargain collectively under any new personnel system.

The argument was advanced by the coalition of five unions in papers filed Friday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The unions are suing DHS and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), asking the court to intervene and stop significant portions of the new personnel regulations from going into effect.

Six weeks ago, the unions sought a summary judgment ruling in the case that would declare the regulations illegal as a matter of law. The most recent filing is in reply to the government’s response to the petition for summary judgment and its motion to dismiss the suit altogether.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said the only appropriate remedy is for the court to invalidate the regulations and order that they be redone in accordance with the HSA.

“There is no way to ‘fix’ these regulations,” the NTEU leader said. “They fail to serve anyone well, including the agency, its employees and the public.” There is a real danger, she said, that the regulations “will get in the way of this vital agency meeting its mission on behalf of the nation.”

The union filing attacked the regulations directly, saying they “establish a sham system of collective bargaining that reserves for DHS management unfettered authority to unilaterally impose its position on every single condition of employment. The DHS scheme is not a collective bargaining system under any definition of that term.”

Under HSA, Congress chose to require that a new DHS human resources management system ensure that employees may bargain collectively, meaning that the DHS regulations had to incorporate the core collective bargaining elements, the unions said.

The government, however, responded in its court filings by addressing a matter not even at issue, the unions charge. While dismissing the well-understood meaning of collective bargaining, the DHS unions told the court, the government motion focuses instead on its authority to depart from the labor statute currently covering DHS employees—Chapter 71 of the U.S. Code.

The unions describe that position as “a red herring” in that they have not alleged that DHS must adhere to the dictates of Chapter 71. Moreover, they told the court, “the government tries to obfuscate a particularly damning aspect of the regulations” that reserve for DHS management the authority to void collective bargaining agreements by issuing a directive, policy or regulation. “The mere existence of this power frustrates the unions’ ability to obtain favorable workplace benefits for the employees they represent,” the unions said.

On a closely-related matter, the unions dismissed the government’s argument that they lack standing to sue. “The government fails to appreciate that the unions are already suffering concrete harm as a result of the regulations, and that more harm is imminent.” For one thing, they said, “bargaining has been brought to a halt,” adding that “favorable negotiated agreements will be voided once the regulations are implemented” and the unions “will face a virtually unwinnable battle on penalty mitigation once the new regulations take effect”—which could be any time.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies, including more than 15,000 in DHS’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).