Posts tagged Public Records Act
WA Supreme Court OKs ‘secretive’ process for state worker union negotiations
July 1, 2025 // “That occurs once the operating budget has passed both houses of the Legislature and been signed by the governor or been allowed to become law without the governor’s signature,” wrote Justice Steven Gonzalez in an opinion agreeing with the majority. Justice Sal Mungia was the lone dissenter. Mungia wrote the exemption ended when the Office of Financial Management and the union reached agreement, not when the governor signed the budget months later. “The people have the right to know what their government is doing. That value is the basis for the Public Records Act,” Mungia wrote. “(T)he Fund was entitled to the requested information.”
TWO BILLS PASSED BY WA LEGISLATURE EXPOSE UNION HYPOCRISY ON PUBLIC EMPLOYEE PRIVACY
May 3, 2023 // One bill, HB 1533, creates a process for public employees purporting to be “survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, harassment, or stalking” to exempt any information about themselves from being disclosed to people seeking government records under the Public Records Act (PRA). Meanwhile, the other bill, HB 1200, requires government employers in the state to regularly turn over the personal contact information—including home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses—of their employees to labor unions. While the two bills are at odds in their substance, the common thread is that they both advance public-sector unions’ goal of being the only nongovernmental organizations with the ability to communicate with public employees. Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 upheld public employees’ First Amendment right to refrain from joining and paying dues to a union in its Janus v. AFSCME decision, government unions in Washington and around the country have worked overtime to make signing up for membership as easy as possible while making cancelling membership unnecessarily cumbersome. Part of the approach has involved attempting to silence the Freedom Foundation’s efforts to communicate information to public employees about their rights while simultaneously increasing unions’ ability to communicate for the purposes of soliciting membership.
OPINION: Spin Control: How did state reach its deal with its unions? Have to wait to see
October 12, 2022 // The Office of Financial Management rejected Mercier’s request for the opening offers. The contracts have not yet been approved by the Legislature, it said, so the agreements are tentative and anything leading up to them would be “exempt as part of the deliberative process” under the state Public Records Act. The problem with that reasoning is that the contract approval equals biennial budget approval, which isn’t going to happen for at least six months. The Legislature rarely rejects the negotiated contract and can’t even make changes, like shaving the raises by a fraction of a percentage point or reducing the bonus for getting a shot designed to keep workers from getting sick.
CALIFORNIA’S GOVERNMENT UNIONS CONTINUE STEADY DECLINE
October 10, 2022 // “This decline is most remarkable because it comes despite that massive hiring boom,” said Jackson Reese, Vice President of California Policy Center and director of CPC’s Janus project. “Every time a worker resigns union membership, her union loses close to $1,000 in dues per year. And, of course, that means $1,000 annually goes into the employee’s pocket.” Reese, who led CPC’s documents review, said his team calculates that the membership losses produced a decline in annual union dues income of just under $337 million. “That’s money the unions no longer have to finance campaigns, engage in political activism or lobby government officials — and that’s a key purpose of our work here,” Reese said.