According to the Department of Labor, various criminal actions took place with regard to Federal employee union officials since January of 2014. All but one involves AFGE.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) reportedly supports the “defederalization” of air traffic control as a boon to safe air travel and suggested an air traffic controller-owned organization apparently operated as non-profit or a quasi-government outfit. Why might NATCA want to see anything less than a complete privatization of the air traffic system?
This FLRA appears ideologically mandated to excuse virtually any union bad behavior. As a result of the FLRA’s failure to hold unions accountable for it, the misbehavior happens frequently
Most federal sector union locals operate on a no cost to them basis. The author asks if it is time for agencies to look at what employees on 100% official time are doing with that time.
The author says that GAO has done a decent job of addressing some of the issues facing supervisors who must deal with employee problems in its recent report. He offers some suggestions for how OPM can carry out GAO’s recommendations.
In a case involving computer security at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), FLRA finds that the Agency’s duty to bargain over curtailing employee access to private email accounts on their work computers trumps the Agency’s statutory obligation to protect the security of information under its control. The Minority Member, in his dissent, said that unlike the majority members, he could not interpret the federal labor statute to, in essence, require an Agency to compromise its computer security to bargain over a minor working condition issue.
FLRA often gets its own law wrong in the opinion of the DC Circuit.
The author provides the text of the senate bill to change the SES system at the Department of Veterans Affairs and a plea to the Congress to control its knee jerk response to allegations of misconduct at the Agency. He asks the reader to judge whether this is good or bad law and whether it supports good or bad government based on its words versus the present system.
On June 3, the D.C. Circuit again reversed the FLRA for interpreting a law other than its own. The case, involving the negotiability of union proposals limiting Agency Inspector General investigations to procedures bargained with a union, demonstrated the Court’s continuing refusal to defer to an FLRA interpretation of a law other than the one it administers. The author suggests practitioners read the complete decision but addresses the highlights in his article.
In a negotiability case involving SSA and AFGE, FLRA Member Pizzella reminded the other members of a recent court ruling reversing a decision and taking those members to task for a theory that the court concluded ended up with two separate results on the same issue depending on which process it arose in. Member Pizzella’s opinion is quoted verbatim in the article and the author suggests it’s worth a read by practitioners.
