It isn’t easy keeping up with the machinations of our union adversaries. Like a punch-drunk fighter, they keep lashing out in every direction these days hoping to land one big haymaker that stops the fight before they lose on points – or worse.

It ain’t working, but it’s always entertaining to watch.

Case in point: This week I navigated to the webpage for Teamsters 117 because it promised a short article about the Freedom Foundation’s ongoing court battle to obtain the contact information for Medicaid-compensated home healthcare workers in Washington. Our goal, of course, is to do what SEIU 775 won’t do – inform the workers that, since a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, they no longer have to pay dues or fees to the union if they choose not to.

Naturally, the unions can’t frame the argument in those terms without sounding … well, ridiculous. So they’ve taken to resisting our completely valid requests on grounds that it would somehow violate the workers’ privacy if what numerous judges have already concluded to be public information were handed over to anyone but the unions – who already have it.

Come to think of it, that argument sounds even more ridiculous than the alternative, but that’s their story and they’re sticking to it.

Which brings us back to the article posted on the Teamsters website:

“Our effort to protect your personal information has taken a new turn. We have been notified by the Department of Corrections that another outside entity is attempting to obtain your information through a Public Disclosure Request (PDR).

As you recall, the anti-union ‘Freedom Foundation’ has already sought to obtain your information from the State. We temporarily stopped the release of that information through a preliminary injunction from a Thurston County Superior Court judge. On July 29, we will be back in court again seeking to make that injunction permanent.

Now, a dubious entity calling itself ‘Practigov’ has made a similar attempt to get their hands on your information. Other than a few vague statements that exist on the Practigov website, our research and legal teams have been unable to find any public information about this group. In fact, the owners of Practigov.com use a service to shield their true identity.

For the record, no one at the Freedom Foundation has ever even heard of Practigov, despite the unions’ not-terribly-subtle attempt to imply we might have created it as a subsidiary organization to do our dirty work (much like the unions did last year, when they created the ironically named Northwest Accountability Project, a union offshoot whose employees waste millions of dollars in union member dues sitting around all day dreaming up outrageous lies about the Freedom Foundation).

As for Practigov, our researchers were obviously a little smarter than the Teamsters’ people were. We quickly discovered its website is operated by something called sovereignmind.net, out of Lansing Mich., and also hosts websites titled yelmhouses.com; hostjam.info; and, beyondwa.com.

We also found Practigov’s original Public Disclosure Request. It reads:

Dear Public Records Administrator,

We would like to request a list of all work email addresses of State employees in a CSV or Microsoft Excel file format including the following fields:

1.  Email address

2.  Full Name

3.  Position Title

4.  Agency Name

Please email the completed file to info@practigov.com.  If you have any questions regarding this request, please feel free to contact us directly.

Note the difference? Whereas the Freedom Foundation’s information request was appropriately targeted to a specific group of workers, Practigov wants contact information for every single Washington state employee.

Best guess? Practigov’s website is probably operated by a lawyer looking to scare up some wrongful termination business. It asks:

“Did you know that it is illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information? It is also illegal to retaliate against a person because the person complained about discrimination, filed a charge of discrimination, or participated in an employment discrimination investigation or lawsuit, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Have you seen these patterns of abuse in your agency? Contact us …”

And the unions will almost certainly argue that giving the Freedom Foundation access to the workers’ contact information is no different from giving an ambulance-chasing lawyer a mailing list of every state employee in hopes of finding one or two with an actionable gripe.

But they know better.

Washington State’s Public Record Act already has a provision exempting requests made for commercial purposes. And numerous judges have already ruled that informing people of their Constitutional rights is in no way a “commercial purpose.”

Thus, Practigov’s request will ultimately be denied based on the same law that will allow ours.

At the end of the day, Practigov is simply the latest strawman dreamed up by the unions to keep the spotlight of scrutiny off of themselves. The entity was either created by a lawyer or other entrepreneur whose motives and methods are completely unlike ours, or it was created by the unions themselves in a last-ditch effort to prop up a lawsuit in free fall.

Either way, Practigov’s impact on us is practically nil.