I am not a fan of public unions either, but this is a cheap shot at them and it hurts the ability to have a discussion about unions. Unions have what is called 'duty of fair representation' - which requires them to defend their members. If the union failed to defend him here he could sue the union claiming it has failed to fulfill its statutory duty to represent the employee in that dispute. If they got to pick which cases to defend, the whole point of having union reps/arbitration/mediation would go out the window.

More reading: http://www.flra.gov/Guidance_duty%20of%20fair%20representati...

Do they have to defend someone who is outside of the union's stated rules/expectations for a member? For instance if the Officer's Union stated that if a member was doing something illegal or grossly incompetent that they would not defend the actions? Not saying that this union does have that sort of stipulation, but curious as to where the line is drawn.

It does seem that the officer had a history of 'bad behavior' and was quite obviously in the wrong here. Do they have to defend 'hopeless cases' is really the question I have.

I would be much happier if the union stood back, and decided to let him try to bring suit, then shut him down in court for his own behavior... Rather than just trying to get someone who obviously has issues reinstated because "reasons".

I doubt there is any sort of line.

Consider that someone accused of a crime gets to be represented in court, no matter how bad the accusation is (in the U.S.). The reasoning behind this is (1) they might not be guilty of the crime, and until the court decides they are, they should be treated as if they are not; (2) they need someone to ensure they are treated fairly.

I think similar reasoning can be applied here. Thus it would not be unreasonable that a union always defends a member who is accused/disciplined/fired.

My mother is (and has been for many years) an officer of the union at her workplace.

I know of many cases where employees were accused of either committing crimes or extreme violations of the "workplace rules" and the Union would not represent them before the company. These instances are the exceptions, of course, and the Union does represent the employee the overwhelming majority of the time -- and are, more often than not, successful in at least saving the employee's job.

This is not a Police Union, of course, so things may very well be different. It is my understanding that the officers in a Police Union are almost always current or former police officers and I would guess that they would represent an officer accused of wrongdoing in all but perhaps the most extreme cases (and, in those cases, it's probably mostly due to P.R.).

In my opinion, an officer accused of wrongdoing is entitled to due process just like anyone else. It does upset me, however, that Police Unions will often do anything they can to save an officer's job regardless of what s/he has done and/or the seriousness of the violation. I realize that that is what they are supposed to do but it ends up reflecting badly on the police department when Officer Smith was found to have done ${whatever} and escapes with little or no consequences.

Quote: Do they have to defend someone who is outside of the union's stated rules/expectations for a member?

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I guess they would say that the person is 'accused' of being outside of their rules - and until they have satisfied themselves of that, then they need to support them.

I think every criminal, no matter how blatantly obvious their crimes, deserves a fair trial, including competent representation at their trial. I think the Officers' Guild's obligations to their members works along similar lines.

Keep in mind, the alternative is that the Guild gets to choose (to a degree) which members to defend and which to hang out to dry. Such a situation leads to a whole host of perverse incentives. The Guild could effectively abandon whistleblowers; the Guild could collude or otherwise be influenced by the Police Department; interpersonal conflicts between officers and Guild leadership/administrators could influence their decisions; etc.

The Guild is a constructed entity whose sole purpose is to serve its members, by providing an organizational counterweight against the Police Department. Several of its obligations to its members ought to be treated as non-voluntary properties of its existence, in the same way that fiduciary duty is a non-voluntary obligation of a corporation to its shareholders, in order to lessen one potential avenue for corruption.

I'm more talking about a system where a (frequent) repeat offender is no longer defensible as a candidate for being reinstated in this sort of job. I'm not talking about a trial in a criminal sense, I more mean the union pushing back to get someone rehired, when that person seems to continue to disregard the rules applied to their occupation.

For instance if you have approximately 120 allegations against him and 21 cases of sustained misconduct Should you get a 121st (or 142nd/22nd however you count) chance? I wouldn't say this is so much the guild exercising a choice, to defend or not, as them giving up on a 'habitual line stepper'. A whistle blower usually only gets 1 chance to blow the whistle (rather than 20-30) so I'd imagine that's a totally different situation for a number of reasons.

Idealistic sidenote: Being that the Guild is for Police Officers, who's main purpose is to protect the public and stop crime (Ok yes the supreme court said that police are not there to 'protect and serve' but to 'enforce') shouldn't the fact that one of their members seems to be continually in trouble with the public at large concern them rather than be something they blindly have to dispute? /idealism

How are they supposed to determine if an illegal action is committed? Isn't that the job of the court system?

The same way the guy did the firing did it?

You don't need to be convicted to be fired; you should not need to be convicted to have your union cut you loose.

I don't see why even the worst accused shouldn't be entitled to a defense. Why should anyone pay dues to an organization that would refuse to represent them? For it to be any other way, the union would have to hold its own hearing, and how would that work? Management would have to bring their complaint to the union for judgement? It's the prerogative of the employer to preside over disciplinary hearings and render judgement. The role of the union is to provide council to the accused member, not to judge him.

In a case where the union member, prior to termination, goes around the building telling everyone that the manager is a drunk and a criminal, making up stories and telling everyone that they're all going to be fired soon, in what might be called a fit of paranoid delusion, do you think the union should then go to bat for that employee? I think the union should absolutely have the right to pick and choose which cases to defend, especially in cases of clear and blatant violation of established rules and protocols.

The fact that most cops might get away with this kind of behavior does not make it any less egregious or untenable. If someone is a patent holder, does their lawyer have a duty to represent them in suit after suit when it becomes clear they (plaintiff) don't have a leg to stand on, and they are just trolling for settlements? Say, just because he pays the bills? No, absolutely not, and if it's done in a sustained and repeated kind of way that's recognized as abusive and the pattern is established, this kind of behavior should be grounds for disbarment.

It's a waste of procedural time. Maybe you're technically right in this case for some reason, because it's a public sector union, the stewards have a duty and the officer requested a defense, but that doesn't make it right.

>>do you think the union should then go to bat for that employee? I think the union should absolutely have the right to pick and choose which cases to defend, especially in cases of clear and blatant violation of established rules and protocols.

Supreme Court decided long ago that unions are legally obligated to defend all of their members regardless of what they do. It is commonly referred to as the "duty of fair representation." It originated in Steele v. Louisville and Nashville Railroad, but there has been more than sixty years of jurisprudence extending and clarifying that right since then. Essentially, what it comes down to is that if you are a member of a union, and you do something dumb, the union has to defend you.

> I think the union should absolutely have the right to pick and choose which cases to defend

I don't believe so since that opens up the whole issue of who is to judge whether the "clear and blatant violations" actually occurred and if there's any extenuating circumstances. This discussion will be had in the hearing where the union takes the side of the defending party.

Basically it's the same principle as fair trial: Everyone has a right to have a fair trial and bring an attorney that has the duty to defend him, no matter the charges or how clear the case seems.

Unions are member-supported organizations with finite resources. (Really, national and international unions have basically infinite resources, but the business owners have finite resources to allocate in order to deal with them.)

The right to an attorney are with respect to criminal proceedings. A defendant does not have a Sixth Amendment right to counsel in any civil proceeding, including a deportation hearing. A fair trial is something that should be available to everyone, but if the lawyers are bogged down defending cases that their own members don't support, then either those unions or those business owners are doomed. I understand this to be a deliberate consequence of union formation, the threat of force is truly a compelling bargaining chip.

Many employment agreements are "at-will" and employers can terminate their employees without cause. In the case where such a firing is really "without cause," I agree that a union should support their member by representing the aggrieved party and making sure they get their unemployment benefits, but if the law says the employer has the right to terminate the employee for any reason or no reason, then this policeman can justly be fired with a laundry list of complaints -- that dwarfs the complaints for every other officer in the precinct -- and a last straw, is this constitutional violation, bullying a person off of public property for taking some pictures of public officials "doing their job."

If I were the union steward, I would meet with the officer well in advance of the hearing, before it had even been scheduled. I would have to open with "OK, convince me."

I'm strongly in favor of public (and private) unions, for what it's worth. The current system is pretty dysfunctional, though. I think unions and the employers should be mostly cooperative, not adversarial in nature. When it becomes Team Employer versus Team Employee and people defend people in their team no matter the circumstances you tend to get dysfunctional and inflexible bureaucracies.

Well, a cooperative relationship of course would work best. Unfortunately the historical circumstances that gave rise to unions didn't include such a relationship. Unions became favorable because of abusive practices by organizations (employers) with an incredibly lopsided advantage in resources (financially and politically). That hasn't changed in the last 100 years.

I agree completely. Countries with better employer-union relationships are typically countries where workers have more legal rights. So outlawing abusive practices to create a better balance of power would help.

Defending a member in a trial/adversarial process and a cooperative relationship do not exclude each other. The union can very well defend the member in this case while still discussing cooperative solutions to the general problem of officers bullying citizens, just as a lawyer can speak for your side while still reaching out to the other side to find a solution that's acceptable for both sides and does not include a verdict.

It is however important that unions have a bargaining power that is at least comparable to the other side's power - and that sometime requires going head to head with the opponent.

The unions ought to have their own internal committee that reviews each case and determines if one of their own has earned the merit of being represented. The fact that they have an agreement to represent a member no matter how wrong that member is is a sign that they need to review the assumptions of the social contract between the members and the union.

That wouldn't work. Now imagine the officer is fired for arresting a local politician and a complaint is filed for excessive force. If the union could pick and choose who to defend, they may court favors from the politician for not defending this guy. Now all protections he had are gone, and he has no recourse since his union won't argue on his behalf. Thats why they have to defend them always, you don't hate the public defender who has to defend the rapist/murder no matter how bad the crime, just the same as you can't hate the union for defending their member.

What about a duty to the union to preserve the reputation of its members in good standing?

I question whether the philosophy of an adversarial system to arrive at justice works as well as we think it does.

I am pro-Union BUT this is the type of things that get them in trouble all the time. People who perform poorly at work should be held accountable and not defended by the Union. It really is in the Union's benefit to weed out bad apples themselves and not protect them.

The Supreme Court disagreed long ago. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7178777

I read it and learned. Did some research. There is wiggle room but I guess everyone is afraid of defining "fair representation" in regards to a firing.

The reason for optimism IMO is the tone and content of the dismissal letter & statement.

I will caution optimism based on tone. The reporter also filed a complaint on the officer in charge of this very incident. The SPD review concluded that "The officer took a normal contact with a member of the public and turned it into a confrontation and escalated it to a point where he was acting in a completely unprofessional and inappropriate manner". The punishment for completely unprofessional behavior by the officer in charge was "one unpaid day off of work" which was "an appropriate measure" in the "middle of the range of possible disciplinary actions". That doesn't strike me as taking it seriously. The sounds to me like a slap on the wrist for being unlucky and causing a PR issue for the police by doing this to a real journalist.

> The reporter also filed a complaint on the officer in charge of this very incident.

Note that these are two different officers with two different groups. Seattle PD disciplined Officer Marion with an unpaid day off. The King County Sheriff's Department fired Sgt. Saulet.

There have always been individual police officers and sheriffs who take a stand against the abuse. The US such is a big country, how could it be otherwise? You can probably find a thousand similar examples if you look hard enough. I think it's already pretty comical that "Officer gets fired after long history of abuse" is news in the first place.

Optimism is only warranted when we have reason to believe things are getting better. One anecdote doesn't do much.

I'm creating an account specifically to reply to this comment. Sheriff Urquhart has only been in office for a year, and this is the third cop he's fired for similar behavior. Details here: http://www.king5.com/news/local/King-Co-Sheriff-fires-deputy...

Given the government so obviously keeps an eye on us, it only stands to reason that we are allowed to keep an eye on them. This is currently a point of contention, but with the current technological advances, I doubt it's one that will be able to stick and stay.

The sheriff (Urquhart) has only been on the job for a bit more than 1 year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urquhart_(sheriff)

How can a government agency allow a person to have "21 cases of sustained misconduct" and still be employed much less not in jail?

No one said he was the worst in the department.

Yes, they did:

"""Saulet has long history of misconduct, with approximately 120 allegations against him and 21 cases of sustained misconduct (more than any other officer in the department). The sheriff's letter says that Saulet repeatedly was told to improve interactions with the public, and provided with remarkable investments of coaching and counseling. Saulet underwent three performance-improvement plans, two training sessions, and two multi-visit sessions with a social psychologist, coaching sessions with supervisors, and 80 hours of time off without pay."""

>more than any other officer in the department

It's in the writing.