FLRA WILL DESTROY LABOR ARBITRATION UNLESS ARBITRATORS DO THIS
In 2017 Trump filled the majority of the seats on the Federal Labor Relations Authority from his stockpile of political operatives who understand the need to crush unions and employee rights to repay their political cult’s benefactors. Once firmly seated, the two Trumpettes started to gut arbitration of federal employee disputes in order to send the message to federal employees that unions can do less and less for them. Given that federal law permits FLRA to review every arbitration decision other than those involve adverse disciplinary actions, namely, actions in excess of a 14 day suspension, the two Trump appointees are in the position to overturn any arbitration decision that goes a union’s way. And they have done just about that because their decisions cannot be reviewed by a federal court. So, for example, when an arbitrator ordered an agency to grant an employee 12 months of retroactive overtime (about $35,000.00) that he had been denied in violation of the agreement, the Trump appointees decided that was not “reasonably and proportionately related to the violation.” Although there is no record of FLRA using these grounds to overturn an arbitration award in the previous 38 years, these Abbott & Kiko have now used it more than a dozen times. Another one of their favorite grounds for gutting arbitrator awards is to second-guess the arbitrator by ruling that the remedy does not “draw its essence from the agreement.” There is little unions can do right now to try to preserve the validity of the arbitration process, but there are a few things arbitrators can do. For example, . . . Continue reading →
