The head of the union representing the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters employees is asking Interior Secretary Deb Haaland for a meeting, saying they need to talk about “stalled negotiations” on a collective bargaining agreement driven by BLM’s leadership.
Doreen Greenwald, the National Treasury Employees Union national president, sent a letter last week to Haaland requesting the meeting. The union representing about 200 nonsupervisory headquarters employees was certified in June 2022, but time is running out to finalize an agreement before President Joe Biden, who has publicly supported federal employee unions, leaves office in January.
Officials with the NTEU chapter representing BLM employees have said they want to wrap up negotiations before the end of Biden’s term, particularly because they are anxious about the possible election of former President Donald Trump, who has suggested on the campaign trail that he’d remove civil service protections for thousands of employees.
Headquarters employees voted to unionize in the years after the Trump-era relocation of BLM’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, which was completed in the summer of 2020. Dozens of senior-level BLM employees left the bureau because of the move.
