Congress Should Protect Federal Workers from Union Coercion

‘B idenomics is about increasing competition,” President Biden recently declared at a meeting of the White House Competition Council. “When companies have to compete, it means lower prices, fairer wages, and more innovation.”

He’s not wrong about the fruits of competition, but the thousands of federal workers being corralled into unions by the Biden administration probably wish the president were more consistent.

While perhaps counterintuitive, it’s important to remember that labor unions are businesses, too; they provide workplace-representation services in exchange for dues derived from the memberships they sell.

But rather than abide by the same regulations and consumer protections applied to other industries, unions enjoy an exemption in federal antitrust law that allows them to collude with each other to limit competition.

Making matters worse, federal agencies charged with protecting workers’ interests too often view unionization as a cure-all and dismiss the concerns of union-skeptical employees as simply people not knowing what’s good for them.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal government’s interactions with its own workforce.

According to Biden’s White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, the administration’s strategy for being a “model employer” is to adopt a “whole-of-government approach” to “implement a suite of strategies to empower workers to organize in the federal sector.”

Digging past the buzzwords uncovers policies like the one under consideration by the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) that would make it needlessly difficult for federal workers to cancel their union membership.

Unlike their state and municipal counterparts — at least before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME — federal workers have never been compelled to join a union to keep their job. However, federal law requires that government agencies deduct union dues directly from employees’ paychecks and remit the  money to the appropriate unions, if authorized by the employee in writing.

But the payroll-deduction system can be easily abused. In recent years, the Freedom Foundation has brought over a dozen federal lawsuits against unions on behalf of state- and municipal-government workers whose signatures have been forged by union organizers on dues-authorization forms.

Other problems are more prosaic but no less real.

Although federal law provides that, once authorized, dues deductions “may not be revoked for a period of 1 year,” the government’s standard dues-deduction-authorization form makes no mention of this limitation.

Further, the regulation proposed by the FLRA in January would again permit unions to restrict federal employees’ ability to cancel dues deductions to arbitrary, annual escape periods.

Such restrictions were commonplace before the FLRA cracked down on the practice during the Trump administration. Most often, union contracts allowed federal employees to cancel dues deductions only during 15-day or ten-day periods calculated based on the anniversary of the employee initially authorizing the deductions. In some cases, employees could cancel the deductions only on the anniversary itself. Miss the window, and the employee is stuck paying for another year.

As FLRA member Colleen Kiko pointed out when dissenting from the FLRA’s proposed reversal of its Trump-era protections, the FLRA has often “heard from employees who were frustrated with narrow form-submission windows occurring on indecipherable anniversary dates.” Unfortunately for these public servants, the Biden administration is on a mission to “[streamline] the process to become a dues-paying member.” Getting out is a different story.

Any other business enterprise attempting to sell nearly irrevocable memberships without disclosing the terms up front would swiftly find itself in the sights of federal regulators.

Just last month, the Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon in federal court for “failing to clearly and conspicuously disclose all material terms of the transaction” before signing people up for Prime memberships and “failing to provide a simple cancellation mechanism.”

It’s time unions started playing by the same rules.

The Paycheck Protection Act, just introduced in Congress by Representative Eric Burlison (R., Mo.), would increase union accountability by ending the collection of union dues via payroll deduction by federal agencies. Given the ubiquity and ease of electronic payment methods, there is simply no good reason to force taxpayers to subsidize a dues-collection system for a private, politically divisive special-interest group.

And for federal employees, paying for union membership with a credit card or bank account need not be any more complicated than purchasing a Netflix subscription and would give them more control over their relationship with their union than the current, coercive dues-collection process provides.

“Folks are tired of being played for suckers,” President Biden proclaimed at the Competition Council meeting, referring to renters, travelers, concertgoers, and the like. But federal workers are consumers, too, and if the Biden administration won’t protect them from predatory union practices, Congress should.