On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) blocked an effort broadly supported by his own caucus to force a vote on restoring crucial labor protections for federal workers that were revoked by President Donald Trump earlier this year.
A Democrat-led petition on the “Protect America’s Workforce Act” is just two signatures short of the 218-member threshold it needs to bypass GOP leadership and force a vote on the legislation. The bill would reverse a Trump executive order that removed collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal employees — a major blow to labor rights in the heavily unionized sector.
Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Arizona), coming off of her confirmation long delayed by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), tried to sign the petition on Wednesday. The petition for the legislation has been signed by the entire Democratic caucus other than Grijalva, as well as three Republicans. If Grijalva signed it, then Rep. Mike Lawler (R-New York) was poised to be the 218th signature, Politico reports.
But members of Jeffries’s staff stopped Grijalva as she went to add her signature on the House floor on Wednesday, Politico reported. A Jeffries spokesperson, Christie Stephenson, criticized Lawler when contacted about the move.
“If Congressman Lawler was as concerned about these working people as he apparently is about his own reelection, he would have signed the discharge petition last night, or any time in the over 160 days since it launched,” Stephenson told the outlet. She said that Democrats would force a vote on it soon.
“We also look forward to him signing on as a co-sponsor of the historically bipartisan Protecting the Right to Organize Act given his sincere concern for collective bargaining rights in this country,” Stephenson said.
The move seems to be in part due to a “political grudge match” between Jeffries and Lawler, Politico noted. Last month, the two got into a shouting match in relation to the government shutdown, with Lawler at one point questioning why Jeffries hadn’t yet endorsed Democratic nominee for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Democrats have also raised concerns that Lawler has said that he’s waiting to be the 218th lawmaker to sign on so he could tout it in his reelection campaign.
However, the collective bargaining rights of over 1 million federal workers — whose lives were just thrown into limbo amid the longest-ever government shutdown — are at stake. Trump’s sweeping executive orders have stripped the right of collective bargaining for workers across over a dozen federal agencies. These workers represent over 80 percent of the federal workforce that’s unionized.
Because the public sector makes up an outsized proportion of unionized workers in the U.S., this move meant Trump stripped the collective bargaining rights of 1 out of every 14 workers covered by a union contract in the U.S., according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress. Experts have dubbed the orders as the single largest act of union busting in American history.
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