Sacramento-Yolo employees win ruling in California Labor Board case charging union bosses with illegal surveillance

(The Center Square) – A California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) administrative law judge has ruled in favor of three Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito & Vector Control District employees against their union officials who the judge said “unlawfully surveilled” their emails and communications.

Workers sought to remove the union from their workplace. In response, union officials began monitoring their email and communications, which the judge ruled was illegal.

With free legal aid from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the employees filed a charge against the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 3 with PERB, alleging union officials violated California law by targeting their protected communications. In May 2019, PERB found merit in their case and issued a complaint so they could then prosecute the union.

The judge ruled in their favor, arguing that IUOE officials “unlawfully surveilled [their] protected conduct” and, as a result, workers were “harmed by the unlawful surveillance when they learned of it.”

The decision states that the employees’ knowledge of union officials “spying” on employees “has a deleterious effect on [their] future exercise of rights” and the workers “suffered harm to their protected right to communicate with coworkers about unionization, decertification, and the Union in general.”

The judge ordered the union officials to immediately stop monitoring the workers’ email activity about the union. The IUOE Local 3 was also required to post copies of the decision in all Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito & Vector Control District workplaces, where it maintains monopoly bargaining power, and send a copy of the ruling to all bargaining unit employees through electronic means, including email.

Problems began after employees Brett Day, Ryan Wagner and Mark Pipkin discussed with other employees how to exercise their rights as public workers under California’s Meyers-Milias-Brown Act (MMBA), the complaint notes. The statute guarantees public workers “the right to refuse to join or participate in the activities of employee organizations” and “the right to represent themselves individually in their employment relations with the public agency.”

Upon hearing of their intentions, union officials requested their employer provide them with copies of the workers’ emails that included the words or phrases, “decertification,” “PERB,” “union,” “decertify,” “how to get rid of union,” “Public Employee Relations Board,” and “Meyers Milias Brown Act,” according to the complaint.

IOUE officials made the request while they also sought to block a push for a decertification election, a means by which workers vote secretly to find out if a majority of employees want to end the union’s monopoly representation. Under the 2018 Foundation-won U.S. Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME, dissenting public employee workers have the legal right to not financially support a union.

“IUOE union bosses’ conduct in this case clearly demonstrates that they were far more interested in maintaining their one-size-fits-all bargaining power over Day, Wagner, and Pipkin’s workplace than in respecting the rights and privacy of the very workers they claim to represent,” National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix said in a statement.

“This favorable decision underscores why government sector union bosses should not have the privilege of forcing their so-called ‘representation’ on all employees in a public workplace, especially not over the objections of employees who oppose the union.

“Even though the Foundation-won Janus decision eliminated the scourge of forced union dues for public employees, there is ultimately no place for compulsory unionism of any kind in state or federal labor law,” Mix added.

The judge’s ruling becomes an official PERB decision in 20 days, according to the law, unless one of the parties files for an exception to it.

Disclaimer: This content is distributed by The Center Square