Isn’t politics supposed to be kept entirely separate from work?
Try telling that to the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), one of several labor unions of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). The NALC is an affiliate of the nationwide AFL-CIO, traditionally one of the Democratic Party’s main pillars of support over the last half-century. So, it probably should come as no surprise that the NALC strongly backed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. That’s fair and legal, but when the NALC scheduled time off for its workers to campaign for Clinton in the second half of last year, it made a deal with its own Super PAC, the Letter Carrier Political Fund (LCPF), that said all NALC workers who wouldn’t be getting paid by the government for hours spent on campaigning efforts would instead be compensated by the NALC via the LCPF. You read that right — their union paid them for partisan political activity.
Say what?
Yes, not only is it true, but it seems that the USPS knew that this was going on and did nothing, despite the historic bias shown by the NALC for one certain political party. The payouts in this case, however, are a definite violation of federal law — the Hatch Act of 1939, specifically. Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin brought these payments to the attention of the federal Office of Special Counsel (OSC), an independent federal agency that determined that the USPS “improperly coordinated” with the NALC and “incurred unnecessary overtime costs” when 97 of its members took time off simultaneously.
“The Labor 2016 program sought to ‘elect Hillary Clinton and pro-worker candidates across the country,’” said an OSC report, citing election tasks performing by postal workers, including door-to-door canvassing, manning phone banks and effecting miscellaneous get-out-the-vote efforts. Furthermore, the OSC said that the “NALC-USPS practice is “longstanding, going back many election cycles, and perhaps started in the 1990s.”
Watch as Fox’s Neil Cavuto discusses this upsetting issue with Bre Payton of The Federalist website.
