The U.S. Department of Education is pushing to strip workplace protections for pregnant or LGBTQ staff, informing employees unions that they need to change policies to comply with President Donald Trump.Presidential OrderAbout “Protecting women from gender ideological extremism.”
In a May 9 email viewed by Bloomberg News, the agency invited unions to negotiate “necessary changes” to the rules, sharing a spreadsheet listing dozens of specific union contract clauses and personnel policies aimed at amending them.
We proposed that the word “pregnancy” be removed from several provisions, including those specifying the kind of discrimination that is prohibited from allowing promotion. He said that if employees are disciplined or selected participants in career development programs, it should be revised to remove sexual orientation mentions, and that “sexual orientation and gender identity” should be scored from a list of characteristics that cannot be used to exclude workers from undergraduate student loan repayment programs.
The agency’s harassment prevention policy entry called for removal of references to “sexual orientation, gender identity, or pregnancy.” The spreadsheet also lists several policies that were said to remove the word “diversity” and replace “they” with “he or her” or “gender.”
Education Department“To ensure that policies are consistent with law and government-wide guidance, we are implementing President Trump’s executive orders regarding defending women in accordance with all applicable federal requirements, including the Federal Labor Management Relations Act,” agency spokesman Maddie Biederman said in an emailed statement. The executive order, signed on the day of the inauguration, directs agencies to remove the “Instruction of Gender Ideology” policy.
The Union of the Department of Education, a chapter in the United States Federation of Government Employees, has rejected the agency’s efforts to change contracts. “The agency has no legal authority to reopen, modify, modify, modify, change and/or change,” local AFGE president Shelia Smith wrote in a May 16 email in response to the agency’s message. She said the union would not agree to voluntarily renegotiate to comply with Trump’s “advocate women” orders, and that if the agency attempts to unilaterally change rules, it will “start lawsuits appropriately as needed.”
“The executive order doesn’t beat our contracts, and they know that,” Smith said in an interview.
Smith, a Civil Rights Office lawyer in the department who has been employed in a layoff whose duties are currently blocked in court, has characterised the promotion of language revisions as an effort to curb workplace rights, including pregnant employees, under the guise of protecting women.
The message to the union did not provide detailed rationale for the proposed changes, such as removing language related to pregnancy, but said that the change “subjects gender-based discrimination in Title VII” under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The U.S. Supreme Court held in 2020 that anti-gay and anti-transgender discrimination was actually among the kinds of sex bias prohibited by the 1964 law, with Trump’s appointee Neil Gorsuch writing his opinion on a 6-3 majority.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.
