SEC Employees Rally Before Union Vote

Employees at the Securities and Exchange Commission held a final meeting to rally support behind an effort to unionize and form a single bargaining unit two days ahead of the vote. “It’s been a much longer journey than we had thought,” Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, told about 250 SEC workers who attended the meeting, which included a guitar-led sing-along. After a year of legal wrangling and protests, a vote is scheduled for Thursday on whether to create a single union to represent the interests of about 1,900 SEC lawyers, accountants and support staff. The NTEU, which already represents about 155,000 federal workers, will represent the SEC workers if a simple majority of voters approve the move. The vote has been opposed by SEC officials, who wanted to create six bargaining units, one for each region and one for the agency’s headquarters, instead of a single unit proposed by the NTEU. SEC spokesman Chris Ullman said it has no plans to block the outcome of the vote.