Union reps must testify, court says

Union representatives can be required to testify before grand juries about something a worker told them in a disciplinary proceeding, even though they can withhold the information from employers, the state Supreme Court said.

A state prison correctional officer and union steward for the Service Employees International Union, which represents state workers, had asked the court to quash a July 2006 subpoena requiring him to testify before a grand jury. The grand jury was weighing possible criminal charges against a psychiatric social worker at the prison.

Other courts have protected the confidentiality of communications between workers facing discipline and the union officials who represent them, but the protections have only applied to the workplace, the ruling said.

Lawyers for the union steward asked the court to extend such confidentiality to criminal proceedings, arguing it is similar to the lawyer-client privilege. A lower court judge disagreed, and the high court upheld his decision Wednesday.

"Whatever state interest there may be in encouraging confidential communications between union members and their representatives is not so strong that, in our view, it outweighs the state's interest in . . . having all relevant evidence of criminal conduct explored," the court said.

A psychiatric social worker at the state prison, Harold McAllister, sued the state over being strip-searched by a state trooper upon arriving at work in September 2005. He said he was told the search was part of an effort to determine how contraband drugs were getting into the prison.

Shortly after he sued, he was charged with illegally possessing someone else's prescription drugs because he had a few of his wife's antidepressants in an Advil bottle. He said he had found the loose pills, which have no street value, in his car after a camping trip and put them in the bottle.

A judge dismissed the criminal charge against McAllister as "absurd" in February 2006. The state Supreme Court reinstated it in January, saying state law strictly prohibits anyone but a pharmacist from possessing someone else's prescription drugs.

The senior assistant attorney general who argued for the subpoena declined to say whether the latest ruling also involved McAllister, because grand jury proceedings are secret.

However, the employee's job description and the date of the incident in the ruling match McAllister's case.

McAllister's attorney, Charles Douglas, and lawyers for the union official did not return messages seeking comment yesterday.

By KATHARINE WEBSTER

The Associated Press