A GS-14 Supervisory Administrative Specialist at the SBA sustained a compensable injury requiring surgery and leave. When she was cleared by her doctor to return to work, she requested a reasonable accommodation, including substantial approval of sick, annual, and LWOP to cover her future absences. The agency denied most of her requested leave and by the time she returned to work she had accumulated 400 hours of AWOL. So, the agency removed her and the MSPB Administrative Judge (AJ) sustained the removal. But when the case went before the full Board, it reversed the judge and spelled out why as follows. This is a critically important case for any union rep defending an employee being disciplined for leave abuse. Continue reading
We at FEDSMILL have always believed that the most important measures of a union are its membership stats. If people are joining, then the union is obviously providing them the value they want. If they are not, then in most cases it is because the union is not giving them what they want. That is more important than the percentage of arbitrations they win, the contract improvements they gain, or the legislative victories they rack up. If a union does great on each of those three measures, but people still do not join, then the union leadership is missing something. That’s why NFFE members should celebrate Randy Erwin and his leadership team who have turned things around to achieve a growth rate every other federal employee envies. Check out the NFFE press release for more details.
The U. S Constitution permits a federal employees not to answer official questions put to them in any investigation proceeding, civil or criminal, formal or informal, when the answers might incriminate them in future criminal proceedings. Generally, an agency accomplishes this by giving the employees adequate notice both that they are subject to discharge for not answering and that their replies (and their fruits) cannot be employed against them in a criminal case. That is commonly known as a Kalkines right. But that leaves the question of what constitutes “adequate” notice of immunity. Continue reading
A GS-8 Contact Representative from Chamblee, Georgia just schooled the IRS on what these terms mean and why it is illegal to engage in them. “Deadnaming” is the practice of … Continue reading
As EEOC tells it, a supervisor sent one of his employees female the following email: “Is this a Micro-aggression, me and Mikey were trying to decide? [m]an, you got a big b**ty for a white girl!!! LMAO [abbreviation for “laughing my a** off”]… [t]hought that would make you smile!! [h]ave an awesome day!” In a previous email he signed it “yo Daddy!”. When she complained about this to higher management, the supervisor was reassigned away from her. But driven by what he thought were his romantic feelings short-time later he handed her this letter after standing in front of her desk silent for a few minutes: Continue reading
Among the precedents the two Trump FLRA appointees destroyed was the Authority’s decades-long approach to objectively deciding whether a union can take “two bites at the apple.” This post is about how to get that reversed. The FLRA and courts have held for decades that the union could not use both the FLRA ULP and contract grievance processes to challenge an incident if (1) the ULP charge arose from the same set of factual circumstances as the grievance and (2) the theories advanced in support of both the ULP charge and grievance are substantially similar. The second element of that two-part analysis is reasonably objective. For example, if a union grieves a violation of a contract obligation to distribute overtime equitably and then files a ULP with FLRA charging the agency with unilaterally implementing a change in how it distributes overtime, those are different theories—and therefore previously permissible. It was only where the grievance and ULP both claimed a statutory violation that the union violated 5 USC 7116(d). Continue reading
Homeland Security fired a Deportation Officer because he traveled home from an assignment in Chile a day earlier than scheduled and spent the day with his family. DHS also cited the fact that he falsified some travel and overtime documents. AFGE took the case to arbitration only to lose. The case then was appealed to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals where the court criticized the arbitrator for not thoroughly examining these two Douglas factors. The case should help unions demand more thorough and legitimate consideration of Douglas Factors by agency deciding officials and arbitrators. You can read the decision yourself at Torres v DHS, Fed. Cir. No. 22-2003 (2023), but here is our brief take on why it is valuable. Continue reading
“Solidarity forever” is one of the great labor songs. It praises unions for uniting all their members together as equals—the ultimate democracies and the polar opposite of top-down corporate control systems. It is also a PR scam. Why? Because the typical union works very hard to keep members divided, marginalized and out of the information loop. It is not hard to do or to miss it being done to you. For example, … Continue reading
Want to know how your union is spending dues money, e.g., who is getting paid what, which outside contractors have been hired, how often the union went to arbitration last year, etc.? Well, as of December 31st each year union whose fiscal year ends in October—and most do, file reports with the Dep’t. of Labor detailing all that. And all those reports are available to you on the web. Here is how to access your union’s report or any other unions. Continue reading