The 88th Comptroller Squadron received a message from the Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center Wednesday that union dues paycheck deductions were cancelled effective March 22, per a presidential executive order, according to an email on the subject shared with the Dayton Daily News.
“We haven’t been able to do a comprehensive review but if employees in your organization were having voluntary union dues deducted from their paychecks, it appears that those union dues deductions were cancelled,” Ross White, supervisor of the Civilian Pay Section at the 88th Comptroller Squadron, wrote in the email.
If employees have questions about bargaining unit or union status, they should be directed to office human resources departments, White wrote.
President Donald Trump has moved to curtail or eliminate collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of federal employees, particularly those working in intelligence and national security jobs, orders that were being challenged this week in federal court.
The AFGE and five other unions moved in recent days for a temporary restraining order that would block Trump’s executive order, excluding more than a dozen federal agencies from collective bargaining obligations, Reuters news service reported.
The local union representing government workers in the Dayton area is moving their members over to AFGE’s e-dues system, said Arnold Scott, District 6 national vice president of the AFGE, representing federal employees in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio.
“This means that the administration can no longer use dues to try to control the union,” Scott said.
“President Trump’s latest executive order is a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants — nearly one-third of whom are veterans —simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies," AFGE President Everett Kelley said in late March.
The 88th comptroller squadron handles financial management and services at Wright-Patterson. It is the largest comptroller squadron in the Air Force, responsible for managing 32% of the entire Air Force budget, an Air Force account said in 2023.
Questions were sent Wednesday to spokesmen for both the Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center and the 88th Air Base Wing at Wright-Patterson. A representative of the center referred questions to the wing.
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