Home Media Center News Releases

Washington, D.C.—In a joint legal brief, the nation’s two largest federal employee unions asked a federal appeals court to overturn a decision by the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) they warn could seriously undercut and narrow collective bargaining in the federal sector and lead to a sharp increase in litigation.

The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) took the lead in filing a friend-of-the-court brief with the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to overturn an FLRA decision that would expand the rights of agency managers to decide is an issue is significant enough to warrant bargaining with their unions.

Earlier this year, in a case involving the Social Security Administration (SSA), the FLRA overturned 25 years of its own precedent to rule that an agency need not notify a union and bargain, if requested to do so, over changes to substantive conditions of employment that the agency—given new discretion by the FLRA—can now deem to be ‘de minimis,’ or of insufficient consequence to warrant notification and bargaining.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said the impact of the decision could be to “significantly narrow an agency’s obligation to bargain” with a union over matters that, in fact, have considerable importance in the workplace.

“Agency management might see a matter as inconsequential,” she said, “when, in its impact, it most surely isn’t inconsequential.” As an example, she pointed to an instance in which Internal Revenue Service management in a Midwestern office notified the local NTEU chapter of what appeared to be an innocuous change: because new carpeting was going to be installed, employees would have to be relocated—with their files—for a few days.

In response, the NTEU chapter proposed bargaining over procedures to safeguard the sensitive taxpayer data in the files to be moved by an outside contractor. “Were this change to be considered de minimis,” Kelley said, “the employees’ valuable practical insight on safeguarding the files entrusted to their care could be ignored, with serious potential consequences for both employees and taxpayers.”

The NTEU leader warned that the FLRA decision, if permitted to stand, would lead to “considerable confusion” in federal sector labor relations and an inevitable decrease in collective bargaining accompanied by an increase in litigation.

The case at issue before the FLRA earlier this year involved the failure of the SSA in Charleston, South Carolina, to negotiate with employees about one of their working conditions involving parking.