Bureau Of Land Management Employees Unionize In Wake Of Trump-Era Upheaval – By Dave Jamieson (Huffpost) / May 25, 2022
The understaffed agency was buffeted by a headquarters relocation. Now workers are hoping a union can strengthen their hand.
Federal workers who help oversee hundreds of millions of acres of federal land have formed a union.
Headquarters employees of the Bureau of Land Management voted 136 to 20 in favor of joining the National Treasury Employees Union in a ballot count held Wednesday, the union said. The new union would include roughly 200 workers based in Washington and regional offices around the country.
Part of the Interior Department, BLM is responsible for managing roughly a third of all federal land, equal to about 10% of the U.S. landmass, the bulk of it in the West. A handful of the agency’s offices already have union representation, but the headquarters group is the largest to unionize to date. The union will include workers who manage BLM programs and budgets, as well as administrative staff.
