OPINION:
Nearly half a century ago, a big labor Congress adopted a statute enshrining into the federal code government union bosses’ monopoly power to codetermine with U.S. chief executives and/or their appointees how federal civil servants are managed and disciplined.
The framers of the mislabeled “Civil Service Reform Act” (CSRA) of 1978 cynically claimed that statutorily authorized union monopoly bargaining “safeguards the public interest” and “contributes to the effective conduct of public business.”
The reality is quite the opposite. Under the CSRA, elected presidents who are accountable to the American people no longer have effective authority over the operations of the federal government. Much of the power of chief executives and their appointees is delegated over to government union officials who are in no way accountable to voters.
The real aim of big labor politicians who rammed through the CSRA and dozens of state laws authorizing union monopoly bargaining over public employees during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s: Establish a massive new political machine. And it worked.
In 2023-2024, according to an analysis by the website Open Secrets, the 20 most political government unions poured more than $75 million into the coffers of union-label Democratic federal politicians and their allied organizations.
Federal union bosses are notable for their corruption as well as for their political activism. According to a 2023 analysis drawing on data from the U.S. Labor Department, the 320,000-member American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) — the largest federal union — accounted for more than 10% of all “union corruption convictions” between 2012 and 2022, despite representing “just 2% of all unionized workers.” Over the decade covered, that’s the “highest conviction rate” of any U.S. union.
Recent Labor Department and media reports indicate that embezzlement of civil servants’ dues money continues to be rampant in the AFGE.
A May 28 investigative report for USA Today by Erin Mansfield furnished compelling evidence of outrageous abuse of federal employees’ dues money by local officials of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), the second-largest federal union, in San Francisco.
Ms. Mansfield reports that in 2023 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employee and NTEU Chapter 212 Vice President Brandon Bruce wrote to NTEU headquarters about highly questionable unreported expenditures by then-Chapter 212 President Michael Roberts. Mr. Bruce ultimately obtained financial documents allegedly showing that Mr. Roberts and his cronies had misappropriated more than $116,000 in Chapter 212 funds.
But when top officials at NTEU headquarters were informed about the apparent financial wrongdoing, they retaliated against Mr. Bruce by urging the FDA to fire him instead of punishing the miscreants.
Corruption in the AFGE union also evidently flows from the top. A federal lawsuit alleges that current AFGE General President Everett Kelley and other AFGE bosses knew for years that former General President J. David Cox was sexually harassing union employees and vendors and misusing union dues-funded limousines for his personal affairs, but did nothing to stop it. Instead, they repeatedly conspired to get Cox off the hook for his criminal misconduct.
Mr. Kelley, NTEU General President Doreen Greenwald and other powerful federal union bosses are now being forced to defend in court the extraordinary privileges they and their predecessors have long wielded as a consequence of an executive order issued by President Trump in late March.
Citing a CSRA provision that empowers the chief executive to prohibit union monopoly bargaining over federal employees charged with defending national security, executive order 14251 will reduce the number of federal civil servants subject to big labor’s so-called “exclusive representation” by an estimated 75%, if it ultimately stands up in court.
As their lawyers wage a legal war against the Trump administration that is almost certain to go all the way to the Supreme Court, government union bosses are self-righteously pretending that their sole motivation is to defend the “union rights” of federal civil servants.
But the record shows that AFGE and NTEU bosses are far more concerned about maintaining and expanding their political power and protecting the ability of union bigwigs to enrich themselves at rank-and-file civil servants’ expense than they are about defending civil servants’ legitimate interests. In short, Everett Kelley and Doreen Greenwald are looking out for No. 1.
• Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Committee and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
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