The Trump administration has unilaterally stripped hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their union contracts after a federal appeals court overruled a lower-court injunction that had halted the plans.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the second-largest federal agency, announced on Aug. 6 that it was terminating the union contract for more than 350,000 of its workers. Nearly 12,000 workers at the Environmental Protection Agency and thousands of employees at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency lost their collective bargaining rights two days later.

Most of the workers affected were members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).

An estimated 400,000 workers in all have been affected, accounting for about 2.6% of unionized workers in the United States.

“I think that what this administration is doing is trying us as a test bed. If they are successful, I do believe that they’ll be coming after every labor organization in the United States,” said AFGE President Everett Kelley.

The actions come after a federal appeals court lifted a preliminary injunction blocking President Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order on collective bargaining.

The Guardian, Aug. 22