Glacier National Park employees joined a National Park Service employee union pending the certification of election results, which was slated for late Thursday afternoon. Employees from 12 parks across the intermountain west voted for the National Treasury Employees Union to represent them. According to election results collected by the Federal Labor Relations Authority, park service workers voted 317 to 11 in favor of a union.
The movement began after mass layoffs from the Trump administration last year left federal employees concerned about their jobs, union member and interim officer Peri Sasnett said. She’s worked at five national parks including her current position at Glacier National Park.
“Most every park I’ve worked at, someone at some point had said, ‘we should have a union,’” Sasnett said. “No one ever really did anything about that or knew even how to approach that. But then this past winter, in early 2025, things were pretty dire for federal employees and people were losing their jobs and things felt really precarious. I think people looked around and were like, ‘who’s fighting for federal employees?’”
The National Parks Conservation Association reported the park service lost nearly a quarter of its permanent staff last year after the administration’s cleaving of the federal workforce. At Glacier National Park, a hiring freeze and the termination of all probationary employees left the park scrambling to fill its seasonal ranks at the precipice of a busy summer season.
Two of California’s largest national parks, Yosemite and Sequoia & Kings Canyon, also voted to unionize last year, citing federal turmoil.
The new union chapter will represent approximately 650 employees from Glacier National Park and 11 other parks around the intermountain region (IMR), including in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Arizona. The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) represents two other NPS chapters at park service headquarters and in Washington, D.C., in addition to 37 other federal agencies and departments.
“NPS IMR employees protect our national heritage and some of our most cherished national treasures,” NTEU National President Greenwald said in a prepared statement. “NTEU is honored to help them exercise their collective bargaining rights and improve their work lives.”
The union will represent all categories of employees, including park rangers, scientists, administrative staff, and both permanent and seasonal employees. A spokesperson for Glacier did not respond before publication time.
Sasnett described reaching out to fellow park service employees over the past year to chat about their thoughts on a union, at times hiking in to reach rangers in Glacier’s backcountry districts, where rangers spend their summers off the grid without cell service.
“I feel a much stronger sense of community and solidarity with my coworkers than I did before this,” she said. “It’s really a different thing to sit down together and actually ask about their lives and their work and what they’re struggling with and how that might overlap with my own struggles, and how we as a community or we as a union could try to make that better.”
“What it all comes back to is that we love our jobs and we love being able to take care of these incredible places,” she continued. “We just want to be able to be treated fairly and to be able to do our jobs, and having a union can only help us do that.”
Sasnett said next steps include setting up the chapter’s internal structures and leadership while they continue to organize. She noted that she spoke in her personal capacity as a union member, and not as a representative for NPS.