FLRA’S CHURCH LADY EXPOSES HERSELF

The FLRA Chair, Colleen Kiko-Duffy, has made it a point to publicize not just her faith in God, but also her active involvement in her church. So, imagine our surprise when we saw her criticism of the parties to a labor agreement in a recent decision because they did not define what they meant when they wrote that official time could be used in a “reasonable” way. She was incensed because such a subjective term “failed to provide any objective guidance for resolving the dispute,” and that inevitably would lead to “protracted litigation at the public’s expense.” As we read her words, we could almost see her imagining herself atop the Mount fulminating, frothing and beseeching us masses to lead radically better lives—or at least write clearer sentences. But…

if you have followed this Trump appointee’s decisions over the last four years you instantly recognize this as a massive act of soul-less dishonesty and hypocrisy by Sister Colleen. Oh, it is no where near the levels of the great religious hypocrites of our times such as Swaggart, Shanley, Bakker or her own Cardinal McCarrick.  But it does make her competitive with her Trumpette colleague James Abbott. We say this because as the leader of the three-person FLRA who has the final say as to whether a decision goes out the door Kiko has imposed some of the most subjective, vapid, confusing legal criteria in the 40+ history of federal labor relations.

For example, she signed off on the idea that an arbitrator’s decision can be overturned if the remedy does not “reasonably and proportionately” relate to the violation. That’s right; your eyes are not deceiving you. She used inflicted the same term on us practitioners that she now condemns us for using. It makes one wonder whether she even reads her own decisions or just signs off on whatever the Hermitage Institute for Real American Values In An Ivory Pure Republic sends her. In another case, she blessed the idea that a change in working conditions must be “sufficiently significant” before the agency must negotiate over it. We agree that it may have been hard to precisely define just when a change is negotiable, but by changing the existing criterion, i.e. significant, by just adding a vacuous adjective she tossed out decades of case law that at least gave the parties benchmarks for assessing and guiding their own situations.

While we could go on and on with examples of her deliberate obfuscation of the law, we will end with one more. Not long ago she put her signature to a decision which held that a union is prohibited from challenging a violation of law in one year if it challenged a separate but “substantially similar” violation that occurred in a different year. So, if the union files a grievance over the agency firing union rep Smith in 2020 for his involvement in the recently concluded very contentious term negotiations it cannot file a ULP if the agency fired union rep Jones in 2021 for her involvement in the same negotiations if the agency can show the firings occurred under “substantially similar” circumstances.  Before the fact that Jones and Smith were two different people was all that was required to authorize the union to pursue two cases.  Now the union must be ready to rebut the agency’s newly minted “substantial similarities” defense if it wants to use a different forum for them.

It is no secret why Kiko and Abbott are sprinkling subjective, content-less criteria all over federal labor law.  They want to replace a government “operated by laws” with one run by the opinion of the men and women appointed to positions of power. If they can replace the largely objective criteria of law that many of their predecessors and the courts have placed into precedent over the decades with meaningless words, future party appointees can use them to do whatever they want.

But the other lesson here is about Kiko herself and who she has exposed herself to be with this decision. She can fill her pockets with rosaries, stuff a dozen Kirpans in her belt, wear layers of Tallits, and rig some propane contraption to put a tongue of fire over her skull to advertise to the world how close to God she is. But when she so blatantly condemns others for what she herself regularly engages in, we must point out what a phony she and her case decisions are. If she were truly as close to God as she proclaims to be, she would repent, go find a desert to wander around in for 40 days, and think about Matthew 6:1 or 23:27.