In courting votes from federal workers in 2008, Barack Obama promised to reverse Bush-era decisions that removed collective bargaining rights for federal employees. He made the promise in an October 2008 letter to John Gage, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO.

Last time we updated this promise, we honed in on three actions during the Bush administration that Obama could undo to meet this promise: 1) Repeal the National Security Personnel System, a set of federal pay rules that unions said restricted collective bargaining rights for civilian Defense Department employees, 2) remove a prohibition against collective bargaining for Transportation Security Administration workers, and 3) restore a union for workers at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

As we noted earlier, Obama crossed off the first item on that checklist when he signed the fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill in October 2009, which repealed the National Security Personnel System. Since then, the TSA Administrator, John Pistole, enabled TSA workers to have collective bargaining rights on limited, non-security issues such as shift bids, transfers and awards in February 2011. Pay, pensions and any form of compensation were not part of these rights.

And in reviewing the progress for this update, we found no evidence that workers at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives received union representation again. No public document we could find suggests the Obama administration ever attempted to restore this union.

Given the Obama administration's mixed success in restoring collective bargaining rights for federal employees, we rate this a Compromise.