Federal Unions, Including IFPTE, Urge Senators to Oppose Charlton Allen, Nominee for FLRA General Counsel
The Federal Workers Alliance (FWA) resent a letter signed by 19 labor unions, including IFPTE, to all Senate offices urging Senators to reject the nomination of Charlton Allen, the Trump Administration's nominee for General Counsel for the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA).
The letter makes clear that Allen is unsuitable and unqualified to serve as FLRA General Counsel. The Office of the General Counsel and the FLRA General Counsel role is a critically important role for effective labor-management relations in federal government and protecting federal employees’ statutory collective bargaining rights, including investigating and prosecuting unfair labor practice complaints.
The FWA letter cites Allen’s comments from his unsuccessful 2012 campaign for the North Carolina state legislature where he responded to a conversative organization’s questionnaire that “no public employees” should have collective bargaining rights in the state. The FWA letter also notes that he “stated that he did not believe employers should be required to provide benefits like paid sick leave, and he described the minimum wage as ‘an unfair intrusion into the labor market’.”
The FWA letter and the undersigned unions also flagged the discriminatory and disqualifying comments that Allen made as an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina and as founder and editor of a conservative campus publication.
Ultimately, leadership of the FLRA Office of the General Counsel is too important to leave to a nominee who has no relevant experience in federal labor law. The letter reminds Senators that, “there has not been a confirmed General Counsel of the FLRA for nearly a decade,” and “there are over 300 pending cases that the various Regional Directors of the FLRA have investigated and determined that there has been a violation of the Statute which are awaiting a confirmed General Counsel to issue a formal unfair labor practice complaint.” Allowing an unqualified ideologue into a position responsible for enforcing legally protected federal collective bargaining rights is not in the interest of productive labor-management relations nor the American public.