Catherwood LibraryILR School

With little coverage from the news media, 1,000 members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) were told on January 28 that their union rights were being revoked, as the director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency declared collective bargaining at NIMA to be incompatible with new national security concerns. Coming less than three weeks after the Bush administration decided to deny 56,000 airport screeners the right to choose union representation in the middle of an organizing drive by the AFGE (see WIT for Jan. 10, 2003), the NIMA decision does not bode well for the 190,000 federal workers who will come under the control of the Department of Homeland Security by next year. While many of the workers at the mapping agency created in 1996 came from intelligence agency backgrounds that precluded representation, Congress decided that continuation of the labor rights of workers not from intelligence agencies would not interfere with NIMA's mission---an assessment that the AFGE says still holds true.