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The House on Thursday voted 231-195 to pass a bill that would restore collective bargaining rights for federal workers, a first step toward reversing the sweeping changes President Donald Trump enacted earlier this year. Twenty Republicans joined all Democrats to advance the Protect America’s Workforce Act. The legislation still needs to clear the Senate, where it will likely face an uphill battle garnering the necessary votes. Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) introduced the bill on the House floor on Tuesday after Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.). and Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) provided the final signatures last month on a discharge petition, which forced a vote. The legislation would roll back Trump’s March and August executive orders that stripped collective bargaining protections for large swaths of the federal workforce. Its passage was cheered by labor groups, who recently suffered a blow when lawmakers removed a provision from the National Defense Authorization Act that would’ve restored unionization rights of civilian Pentagon employees. “President Trump betrayed workers when he tried to rip away our collective bargaining rights,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement Thursday. “In these increasingly polarized times, working people delivered a rare bipartisan majority to stop the administration’s unprecedented attacks on our freedoms. We commend the Republicans and Democrats who stood with workers and voted to reverse the single largest act of union-busting in American history.” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), who has advanced several measures aimed at expanding the executive branch’s control over the federal workforce, protested the bill in a floor speech ahead of the vote. “When President Trump ran for office last year, he told the American public that, if elected, he would return federal employees to their offices, reform the bureaucracy and restore much-needed accountability to the workforce,” he said. “The American people chose to elect him to do just that.”

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