Tony Reardon, who started with the Treasury Employees as its operations manager 25 years ago and who rose to executive vice president in 2013, succeeded Colleen Kelley as the union’s president on August 13. And Reardon, elected by an 89-11 percent margin at the union’s convention in Hollywood, Fla., faces a problem he did not mention in his inaugural address: The Washington Post’s specialist in covering the federal workforce says a group of GOP senators, in the GOP-run 114th Congress, wants to deprive his union of thousands of members, by putting them out of collective bargaining. NTEU, an independent union with 160,000 members, is the second-largest federal workers’ union. It also represents some workers in the D.C. government. And the Post reported the GOPers, working on the funding bill for the Treasury Department and D.C., want to bar IRS workers from having a union contract. That would toss tens of thousands of workers out of NTEU. The GOPers’ stand is not in the Senate report on the money bill, though. Delegates also chose Jim Bailey, the union’s field operations director for the last eight years, and a 25-year NTEU veteran, to succeed Reardon as executive vice president.
- PAI
- PAI