Posts tagged White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment
White House scrubs webpage showing how taxpayers fund union activities
November 22, 2023 // The OPM, which oversees federal employment and recruiting, removed both the webpage and reports assembled over the past two decades analyzing how much taxpayer money is spent funding union activities. Additionally, OPM appears to have stopped assembling official time reports, which have historically been published every few years during the past four presidential administrations since 1998. "If federal employees are going to be legally permitted to engage in union work while on-the-clock, the very least taxpayers are owed is an accurate accounting of the associated costs," Maxford Nelsen, the director of research and government affairs at free market think tank Freedom Foundation, told Fox News Digital.
Opinion: FACT CHECK: Does Unionization Have Positive Spillover Economic Effects?
September 21, 2023 // Most notably, a 2021 Harvard University report found that right-to-work states boasted more positive spillover effects. Compared to unionized areas, right-to-work (RTW) states boast 1.6% higher employment, 1.4% higher labor participation, and 0.34% lower disability receipts. The study also found RTW laws are “associated with lower childhood poverty rates and greater upward mobility”—with “children at the 25th percentile of the parental income distribution during childhood have a 1.7 percentage point higher probability of reaching the top income quintile during adulthood if they grew up in a RTW location.” Greater upward mobility is also observed in states that give workers latitude over joining a union or not. Moreover, right-to-work laws are shown to improve the well-being of both non-unionized and unionized workers.
Congress Should Protect Federal Workers from Union Coercion
August 10, 2023 // 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.
COMMENTARY: White House Swells Federal Union Ranks – But at What Cost
May 18, 2023 // Using the estimated dues of the largest federal employee union as an example, the new union members for which the Biden administration is taking credit could represent between $37 million and $46 million in annual dues revenue. And as these employees are ushered through the union door, union officials and government agencies appear determined to slam it behind them. For employees who feel this arrangement violates their rights, litigation may be the only way out. In the past year, the Fairness Center, the public interest law firm of which I am president, has filed 36 matters on behalf of federal employees involving 16 unions and eight federal agencies.
Federal Employee Union Membership is Up 20%
March 29, 2023 // The task force asked federal agencies to foster collaborative relationships with their union partners, involve labor organizations in predecisional policy discussions, and remove barriers from unions trying to increase their membership or organize new bargaining units. The group recommended that the Office of Personnel Management instruct agencies to provide information on whether job openings are represented by unions and encourage agencies to provide unions more opportunities to communicate with new hires. In a blog post last week, the vice president’s office announced that just a year after agencies began implementing the task force’s recommendations, the initiative is already paying dividends: over the last year, nearly 80,000 federal employees have joined a union, increasing the total number of dues paying union members at federal agencies by 20%. And in the private sector, petitions for union representation increased 53% from fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2022, while overall union membership grew by 273,000 last year.
White House touts ‘significant results’ of task force after 80,000 feds opt to join a union
March 21, 2023 // Federal unions saw a roughly 20% increase in bargaining unit membership governmentwide, with close to 80,000 feds joining a union between September 2021 and September 2022, according to a March 17 update from the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment. The Biden administration credited the “significant results” to the work of the task force, a group that President Joe Biden created through an April 2021 executive order seeking to strengthen collective bargaining rights for federal employees. Following the initial executive order, the task force, led by Vice President Kamala Harris, laid out 70 recommendations to improve labor-management relations for the federal workforce. Similar to the first priority of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA), the task force said it aims to position the federal government as a model employer, including through worker empowerment.
The Unionization Rate Went, Uh, Down?
January 26, 2023 // Meanwhile, unionization in the private sector is 6.0 percent (down from 6.1 percent in 2021). Perhaps this is because median weekly earnings among union members rose $47 in 2002, compared to a rise of $54 among non-union workers. This is the latest year in a declining union earnings premium that reached as much as 30 percent in 2007 but was just over 18 percent in 2022
Federal unions have a way to locate unrepresented employees, OPM says
August 22, 2022 // The Office of Personnel Management has offered some extra help to federal unions looking to add eligible employees to their membership rosters. Federal unions have tools available in FedScope, OPM’s online federal employee database, to identify which agencies have the largest amounts of unrepresented workers, said Tim Curry, OPM’s deputy associate director for accountability and workforce relations, in an email obtained by Federal News Network. On the other hand, the departments of Education, Energy, Labor, State and Treasury, as well as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, were among the agencies with the lowest numbers of unrepresented workers. The most recent data available in FedScope is from March 2022. NFFE National President Randy Erwin,
OPM, NTEU offer recommendations to improve relationships between agencies, unions
July 22, 2022 // Earlier this year, the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment made 70 recommendations to enhance federal unions, including providing information on unions to federal employees and improving transparency. labor-management relations, Tony Reardon, Tim Curry, Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, Obama and Clinton administrations, Frontline employees
What a Surge in Union Organizing Means for Food and Farm Workers
March 25, 2022 // By organizing with the Warehouse Workers for Justice, many were able to get their jobs back and have their demands met. “What’s really interesting is that there’s a huge movement right now for worker centers and unions to work together ... to essentially surround the industry,” Oliva said. “So if an employer busts the union, the worker center emerges. If the worker center is unable to organize the workers, the union organizes them.”