Judge denies injunction motion DSHS had urged union to file

OLYMPIA, Wash. – A ruling issued in Thurston County Superior Court last week could improve government transparency in Washington by limiting the ability of state agencies to pass the buck to third parties when presented with public information requests they don’t want to honor.

On Friday, Judge Mary Sue Wilson denied a request for an injunction by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 775 that would have prevented the Freedom Foundation, an Olympia-based think tank, from obtaining from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) the dates on which taxpayer-compensated home healthcare providers attend their state-mandated training and orientation sessions.

Wilson agreed the schedules were a matter of public record and subject to an information request, but she delayed implementation of the order for two weeks in order to allow SEIU 775 to seek an emergency injunction from the appellate court.

The Freedom Foundation believes the union uses its exclusive access to the healthcare providers during these required training sessions to deceive the workers into believing they must join the union as a condition of employment despite a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling saying they don’t.

“The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that these caregivers can decide for themselves whether to join or support the union, but the union doesn’t want them to know that,” explained James Abernathy, the Freedom Foundation’s general counsel. “We don’t understand why a private association is given an opportunity to make a deceptive sales pitch to a captive audience at the taxpayers’ expense. If the union wants to recruit new members, let them rent their own meeting room and invite anyone who wants to come.”

In January, the Freedom Foundation filed a request for the dates, times and locations of every mandatory contracting appointment and orientation training session through the end of the year at which SEIU 775 representatives will be given special access to the new workers.

“We’d just like to show up and tell these people the truth, that they don’t have to join the union or pay fees if they don’t want to,” Abernathy said. “As it stands now, the union is allowed to tell lies and use intimidation tactics to get them to sign membership cards, but we’re not allowed to tell them the truth. Somehow that seems backwards.”

Equally troubling was the fact that DSHS, having received the Freedom Foundation’s information request, immediately contacted SEIU 775 rather than simply complying with it. The agency informed the union of the request and gave it a deadline after which it would hand over the information unless SEIU 775 had obtained an injunction preventing it.

DSHS subsequently extended the deadline three times before the union was ready with its injunction request. It was this motion the judge denied last Friday.

“State agencies often don’t want to comply with information requests,” Abernathy said. “But rather than fight it themselves, they find a way to have a third party – in this case the union – do their dirty work for them.”

Under state law, he noted, public agencies are required to comply with information requests unless an injunction is in force by the day the agency committed to provide the records to the requester.

“They can’t invite the union to file for an injunction after the fact, then sit around giving the union extension after extension waiting to see whether the court grants it,” Abernathy said. “State agencies are accountable to the public, not the union.”

SEIU’s attorneys know its legal arguments are meritless, he said, so they’re simply trying to stall until the end of the year, by which time the dates specified in the Freedom Foundation’s information request will have already passed.

“This is a public agency conspiring with the union to avoid having to comply with a valid information request,” Abernathy said. “And they’re doing it to keep state workers from knowing the truth about their legal rights.”

The Freedom Foundation filed its own lawsuit against DSHS last Wednesday for extending three times the deadline by which SEIU 775 needed to obtain an injunction to prevent the information from being released. The organization also has a lawsuit pending that challenges the union’s right to recruit new members during state-mandated, taxpayer-funded training sessions.

“The government of this state is supposed to be accountable to the people, not the unions,” Abernathy said. “It’s high time someone pulled back the curtain and showed who’s really running things in Washington.”