HOW YOUR UNION’S LEADER SOLD YOU OUT FOR BEANS

Any federal union activist with two IQ points to rub together has known since the Reagan era that there are two big holes in the labor law.  First, the White House can decide not to appoint a General Counsel for the FLRA.  If it does or fails to make filling it a priority, it essentially shuts down the agency.  It cannot file ULP complainants, take cases to hearing, or even issue final ULP decisions.  Although it rarely arises, it also loses the power to ask a court to issue an injunction against the White House or federal agencies if they try to irreparably harm federal employees or their unions.  For example, an injunction would be the only way to stop an illegal suspension of  dues withholding, arbitration, or official time before it killed the unions. Leaving the GC job vacant is the silver bullet that kills employee rights. Federal union leaders let that job go unfilled for years during the Biden Administration and handed Trump exactly what he needed to virtually abolish federal labor relations—and they allowed this in return for a pathetic pittance of a payoff from Biden.  The second huge hole in the law is…  

the Federal Service Impasses Panel’s arbitrary exercise of power. It is bad enough that the Panel swings between professional neutral appointees in Democratic Administrations and anti-union, anti-employee zealots when Repubs are in charge.  But it is devastating that the White House has let the Panel operate without regard to law. Admittedly, the statute says that the Panel is empowered to “take whatever action is necessary…” ( 5 USC 7119(c)(5)(B)(iii)), but everyone seems to forget that the statute goes on to say it may not act “inconsistent with this chapter….” In other words, it cannot ignore the law—any law.

Despite that, there is a long record of the Panel denying unions the right to have their bad faith bargaining ULP charges heard before the Panel closes out the negotiations with some flippant comment that “it would not have mattered anyway.”  The same can be said about the Panel taking jurisdiction of a case before the parties have had a chance to discuss all the issues or allowing an agency to put just a portion of a bargaining dispute before it for resolution and implementation.  We call that rocket bargaining and it is illegal. Another FSIP tactic is to similarly void a union’s right to get negotiability rulings from the FLRA and courts.

As it stands today, agencies could serve  proposals for a new contract on a union next Monday,  petition the Panel the following Friday to take jurisdiction to resolve the dispute, ask it to ignore negotiability and bad faith bargaining charges the union may have filed, and get a Panel-imposed final and binding decision in a few hours imposing all the agency’s proposals.  Most tragically, FSIP can do that without FLRA or the court having the right to stop them.

The remedy to most of this would have been for the White House to have the Panel issue regulations establishing the following:

FSIP will not issue a decision in a case if there is an outstanding bargaining-related ULP before the FLRA or arbitrator, nor will it issue a decision in a case where there is an outstanding negotiability dispute before the Authority or courts—unless both parties agree that it may do so.

Unions could also have prevailed on the White House to have OPM issue a regulation barring agencies from pushing for a final and binding Panel decision under these circumstances.  The same could be said about pushing the FLRA to clarify its decision in Interpretation and Guidance, 11 FLRA 626 (1983). That very poorly written decision has led to the confusion over the Panel’s jurisdiction because the Authority simply said this.

If unions had pushed Biden to fill these two gaping  dangerous holes in the law, federal employees would be in a much better position today to fend off Elon Musk pulling Trump’s puppet strings to gut their rights and protections.

What did unions get instead of these vital protections?  A bag of beans and I am not talking about the magical kind. Moreover, it is the same bag of beans that unions allowed Presidents Clinton and Obama to sell and resell them.  The union leaders sold members out to get the right to bargain over some additional topics, like grades of positions, the technology the agency purchases, the instructions management issues for how work should be done, etc.  But not only has no union EVER been able to negotiate a favorable change on any of those topics, but the deal the unions took is that any concession they did get could be taken away by an anti-union White House administration.

Why did union leaders sell out members’ ability to push back against the termination of telework or AWS/CWS or transportation subsidies?  A big part of the explanation is that they get all googly-eyed whenever they are invited to meet someone at the White House who knows the President personally or maybe even meet the President for a few minutes. It is like a 13-year-old girl meeting Taylor Swift. They lose all judgment and perspective and say Yes to anything.

Normally, the top union leaders would have staff present to reestablish their link to the reality of what their members need. But this is where union bureaucracy fails them as badly as their hero-worship emotions.  All too often top union leaders rely on their Legislative Directors when dealing with the White House, not the staff that know the details of the bargaining or arbitration processes. And all the Legislative Directors hear when they are offered a bag of beans is “I got us a bag of something. Hurry, alert the PR department to tout this as fabulous.”  They honestly do not know that the White House staff is laughing at the union for taking a worthless deal that proved worthless in two (and now three) previous pro-union administrations.

So, when Czar Elon snatches away your telework, alternative work schedules, transit subsidies, awards money, and office space, remember how short-sighted your top union leaders were.

 

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.
This entry was posted in FLRA and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.