OPM clarifies that agencies should not violate court orders to terminate union contracts
The Office of Personnel Management clarified this week that a latest memo instructing agencies to push ahead with the termination contracts with federal worker unions was not supposed to encourage violating court orders blocking two government orders excising labor from a lot of the federal authorities.
Last yr, President Trump signed a pair of government orders citing a rarely-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to ban unions at most agencies below the auspices of nationwide safety, successfully stripping two-thirds of the federal workforce from their collective bargaining rights. Although most agencies concerned within the two edicts terminated their contracts final summer season, a smattering of agencies nonetheless acknowledge their workforces’ labor representatives due to court orders briefly barring the orders’ implementation.
But in a memo to agency heads final week, OPM Director Scott Kupor famous that whereas in some situations the orders’ implementation has been delayed, not less than partially due to litigation, and instructed these agencies to transfer ahead with terminating their collective bargaining agreements with unions. This raised the hackles of unions whose standing within the federal office had so far been protected by federal judges, with the National Treasury Employees Union going as far as to inform appellate judges listening to their lawsuit difficult the manager orders of the doc.
OPM on Tuesday revised the document to embody language clarifying that agencies topic to a court order stopping their implementation of the anti-union edicts should proceed to abide by the judges’ choices.
“This guidance does not apply to bargaining units where there is a currently-applicable court order preventing implementation of the executive orders with respect to those units,” Kupor wrote.
An OPM spokesperson declined to present details about what number of agencies named within the government orders had shunned terminating their collective bargaining agreements for causes aside from a court order, directing Government Executive to ballot every particular person company.
In its submitting final week, NTEU additionally cited contract termination template accompanying Kupor’s memo instructing agencies to start submitting decertification and unit clarification petitions with the Federal Labor Relations Authority as a result of they’re “no longer subject to” federal sector labor regulation as a part of its argument that it can’t pursue its claims administratively prior to submitting a lawsuit.
“NTEU has maintained that the statute’s review scheme is not available because the executive order has excluded the defendant agencies—albeit improperly—from the statute’s coverage,” the union wrote. “The template termination notice validates NTEU’s position: it explicitly states that ‘the provisions of the FSLMRS no longer apply’ to the agencies named in the executive order.”
But in its own filing Before the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, the Justice Department mentioned unions might merely problem any submitting agencies made with the FLRA and argue the underlying orders have been invalid then.
“The OPM steerage proceeds on the premise, in line with the federal government’s place on this litigation, that the manager order is authorized, and that subsequently the provisions of the [federal sector labor-management relations statute] “no longer apply to the agencies and subdivisions named in that order,” the administration wrote. “But the guidance does not suggest that the executive order has eliminated the channels by which a union could challenge the order’s validity before the FLRA.”
