The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is supposed to do the rather boring (and possibly ineffectual) work of insuring bank deposits. Instead, it has cultivated a culture of heavy drinking, strip clubs, and harassment of female employees.

That’s according to an independent report by the law firm Cleary Gottlieb that the FDIC commissioned after a Wall Street Journal investigation into the agency’s culture raised alarm. “For far too many employees and for far too long, the FDIC has failed to provide a workplace safe from sexual harassment, discrimination, and other interpersonal misconduct,” the independent report says. “We also find that a patriarchal, insular, and risk-averse culture has contributed to the conditions that allowed for this workplace misconduct to occur and persist, and that a widespread fear of retaliation, as well as a lack of clarity and credibility around internal reporting channels, has led to an underreporting of workplace misconduct over the years.”

The Journal raised questions about, among other things, the FDIC’s eleven-story hotel in Arlington, Va., which the agency says it needs for employee trainings. The hotel “was a party hub, where people have vomited in the elevator and urinated off the roof after nights of heavy drinking,” the Journal story said.

Cleary Gottlieb received reports from over 500 individuals “often painfully and emotionally recounting experiences of sexual harassment, discrimination, and other interpersonal misconduct that they have suffered at the FDIC.” Against this mountain of evidence, lawmakers have finally called for FDIC chairman Martin Gruenberg, a Democrat favored by progressives such as Elizabeth Warren, to resign. Gruenberg has said he will resign once a successor is confirmed.

As these employees were facing truly awful experiences in the workplace, one might wonder whether it would have helped to have a union to defend them. Surely this kind of thing wouldn’t happen in a unionized workplace where a labor organization could stand up to management on behalf of the workers. This must be what it’s like in the evil capitalist world of 21st-century America where most workers aren’t in a union and are left to fend for themselves.

But FDIC bank examiners are unionized. They are represented by the National Treasury Employees Union. And the independent report shows that union “protection” didn’t help some of the victims.

“An employee reported to us that a former executive in headquarters grabbed her and rubbed himself on her after a happy hour around 2018,” the report says. “She told a union representative, who advised her that if she made a complaint, the FDIC would simply move the executive to a new position. The employee said she believes the union representative meant well, but felt unempowered to make any real change.”

A senior bank examiner sent an unsolicited picture of his penis to a younger female bank examiner. “She did not want to be perceived as a ‘troublemaker’ and in fact when she had first joined the FDIC, she had been told by a union steward who was acting as her trainer that ‘you don’t report, you don’t say anything, because you end up getting fired,'” the report says.

A woman said her manager was bullying her and reduced her performance rating from five to one, even though her other colleagues and bankers she worked with during examinations viewed her positively. The manager would bring her to tears, and she was terrified to answer the phone when she saw the manager’s name on caller ID. “She told us that she went to the union about her situation, but they were not able to help,” the report says. “The union representative she was asked to work with was too nervous to challenge the manager’s actions because of the manager’s close relationship with the Field Office Supervisor, who had close connections in headquarters. She said she was told there was nothing the union could do because she was not a member of a protected class.” She was ultimately fired.

Perhaps most striking is that for the vast majority of incidences of abuse and mistreatment included in the report, there is no mention of the union at all. Most employees did not report even trying to contact the union to help protect them from management. That suggests they don’t see the union as useful or effective in defending them.

The report indicates that the proliferation of procedures and rules within the agency added to the confusion of how to handle bad behavior. That included the union: “Supervisors and managers said that the lack of clarity in policies and procedures leads to different parts of the organization — OMWI, LERS and LEAS, the Union, the Internal Ombudsman — to push allegations back and forth to one another without any resolution.”

“FDIC employees also reported that, instead of being disciplined, individuals who were known to have engaged in interpersonal misconduct appeared to be simply ‘moved around,'” the report says. This is typical of unionized workplaces, such as public schools, where bad teachers are shuffled to different grades or classrooms rather than being fired. The phenomenon is so common it even has a name: the dance of the lemons.

In response to a Wall Street Journal editorial partly critical of the union, NTEU president Doreen Greenwald wrote, “Decisions that made employees fearful to report misconduct and allowed offenders to go unpunished fall squarely in management’s lap. The union doesn’t represent the supervisors, managers and executives largely responsible for the misconduct.” But of course: The union is supposed to defend lower-level employees from supervisors who treat them poorly.

“As the voice of FDIC employees, we will continue our efforts to ensure the findings of the report are addressed and FDIC employees are provided a safe work environment,” Greenwald wrote. That’s a little hard to take seriously given that some of the misbehavior in the report goes back almost 20 years, and the FDIC’s workplace culture has been the subject of previous reports from the agency’s inspector general and from the press. Was this news to the NTEU? How did it allow this workplace to get to this point for its members?

Ultimate responsibility for the harassment and misbehavior lies with the perpetrators, not with the union. That being said, this workplace was toxic for years despite being unionized, and the few victims in the report who said they asked for union assistance did not find it helpful. It’s no wonder 90 percent of American workers are in non-union workplaces, most of which are much safer than the FDIC — and where they don’t have to have dues taken out of their paychecks for nothing in return.