The war on federal employees and their unions marches on as elected officials in the Senate seek to make the IRS an independent agency and get rid of its union.
The Senate Finance Committee has recently issued a four-part report with “additional views” from Chairman Orrin Hatch calling for exemption of the IRS from union representation in response to a scandal in which the IRS used controversial criteria to select organizations seeking tax exempt status for further review.
“It is virtually impossible for the IRS to maintain the reality, much less the appearance, of neutrality and fairness to all taxpayers, when a substantial number of IRS employees are members of the highly partisan and left-leaning National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU),” Hatch writes. “The only way to completely eliminate the appearance of any bias is to add the IRS to the list of agencies where union membership is prohibited.”
Hatch also targeted office time used by IRS employees to represent their co-workers in grievances, collective bargaining, and other workplace representation as allowed under law.
Ranking Member Ron Wyden quickly responded that Hatch has no evidence to support his allegation that union membership influenced IRS’s alleged political decisions to target certain groups and that the former IRS manager at the center of the targeting controversy, Lois Lerner, was not even eligible to join a union.
Hatch’s call to eliminate the IRS union is the latest attempt to destroy unions once and for all. This could be your job, and an attack on one agency means it’s coming our way.
If Hatch succeeds at the IRS, other agencies will be next. We have no choice but to become Big Enough to Win to defeat these attacks.