PIZZELLA’S POMPOSITY

Newly-minted Member Pizzella has launched his FLRA career by largely lecturing the labor-management community on his loyalty to the fight against government waste. His latest sermonette (delivered as a concurring opinion in AFGE, 67 FLRA 218) condemns an AFGE local for wasting government resources by filing exceptions to an arbitration decision it lost.  He specifically wrote that based on his personal opinion that the odds were greatly against the union winning before FLRA, “It is unlikely that Congress envisioned that such futile endeavors would ‘contribute to the effective conduct of [the government’s] business’ or facilitate the ‘amicable settlement of disputes.’”

Perhaps Member Pizzella should page through the Congressional Record more often.  If he did, he might have run across the 46 times that one particular political party in the House of Representatives, not to be named here, has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, even after the Supreme Court held it to be Constitutional. Or perhaps he would have marveled at one Senator reading “Green Eggs and Ham” to a nearly empty room on government time. Or he might have even gasped when he saw political representatives of that same party shut down government for 16 days at a BILLION-DOLLAR COST to Member Pizzella’s beloved taxpayers.

In light of Pizzella’s pounding away at government waste, we can only imagine the tongue-lashing he gave the Koch Brothers and their followers at Rancho Mirage when he met not long ago with them to outline their political agenda for the future.  Surely, it was a brutal beating given that the plan they urged would waste billions of times more money than the salaried government resources AFGE allegedly squandered in this case. Perhaps it even left him traumatized to the point that today he strikes out at even the tiniest instances of perceived waste.  That would explain why he has confused the role of a “representative” with that of a “neutral.”  After all, while he is a neutral paid to judge matters, unions are representatives with a statutory obligation to represent employees and hopefully the predisposition to do anything within reason to help a member/client, even if it means going to court over a hanging chad.

About AdminUN

FEDSMILL staff has over 40 years of federal sector labor relations experience on the union as well as management side of the table and even some time as a neutral.
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