Union sues IRS for interfering with free speech

The National Treasury Employees Union has filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service accusing it of systematically removing its materials from the common spaces in the offices as well as employee workstations.

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Earlier this year, the IRS terminated a longstanding contract  with the NTEU in response to an executive order last year from President Trump that ended collective bargaining rights at over 20 federal agencies and departments.

The NTEU accused the IRS of “textbook illegal viewpoint discrimination” under the First Amendment and said the move interferes with its members’ constitutional right to associate with other union members. 

“NTEU will not stand for the Administration’s effort to retaliate against us for our advocacy and to try to erase NTEU from the workplace,” said NTEU president Doreen Greenwald in a statement Monday. “NTEU has represented IRS employees for nearly a century. It will continue to fight for their right to speak up and support the union.” 

The lawsuit was filed in a Washington, D.C., federal district court. The IRS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit pointed to a memo from IRS officials saying, “IRS leadership has identified instances of NTEU flyers, posters, and other paraphernalia remaining in place at IRS posts of duty. Given the high-profile nature of these materials as they relate to the President’s Executive Order, and given IRS senior leadership’s prior directive to ensure all of these materials have been removed, I’ve been asked to ensure that recurring instances of NTEU materials in the workplace be addressed immediately. Therefore, I’m tasking all hands with the following:

• Please conduct a walkthrough of your post of duty and remove any and all NTEU materials you observe, by the end of next week (June 5th). 
• If the material is inaccessible (e.g. inside a locked bulletin board, on the interior of a transparent, locked door, etc.) please take whatever steps are necessary to access and remove the material (within reason – obviously don’t break or vandalize anything to get to it). 
• If you are traveling to a site that does not have resident FMSS staff, please take the time to conduct a walkthrough there as well while you are on-site. 
• Please confirm through your management chain, by building code, where and when walkthroughs have been completed.”

The lawsuit provided several instances where union materials had been removed by IRS officials, including a large IRS campus in Kansas City, Missouri, where it said IRS Facilities Management and Security Services has been “particularly aggressive in targeting NTEU materials. Earlier this month, the local NTEU chapter set up a table at the facility’s cafeteria during lunchtime as a way of inviting employees to speak with them about workplace issues.
“The chapter had NTEU flyers at the table,” said the lawsuit. “The cafeteria is a location where employees would sometimes put flyers to advertise a cause or event. The chapter had set up a table in the cafeteria with NTEU flyers on previous occasions. But on this occasion in early June, after the issuance of the IRS directive, an FMSS employee took the NTEU flyers at the chapter’s table, crumbled them up, and threw them away.”

The IRS has needed to reassign and rehire thousands of its employees after a wave of cutbacks and voluntary buyouts last year led to the elimination of about 28% of its staff. However, the staff has needed to deal with overcrowding and problems with rats in one facility in the Atlanta area.