This is not the first time we have written about managers who either can’t keep their mouth shut or their documents clean. The newest example is the Chief of Dental Services who just cost a VA hospital over $8,500 by ignoring an employee’s right to medical privacy. Continue reading
Read over the facts below and identify what, if anything, the union can do to help. The answer is provided below the facts.
FACTS: Assume that an employee’s administrative workweek starts in the wee hours of Sunday morning and goes through to midnight the following Saturday. Let’s call her Keisha Krull. During the last year, she has always had a tour of duty running from Tuesday through Saturday starting at 8 a.m. and ending at 4: 30 p.m. Those were her regularly scheduled 40 hours. However, due to extremely tight budgets, the agency’s regional manager has decided to adjust the schedules of the people in Keisha’s work unit so as to avoid the need to pay any overtime. He moved staff from the slow periods of the week to the busier periods. Keisha’s new tour was Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Her hours on Monday were from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. but the rest of the week she was to work from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
LR informed you, the union leader of the change, just three workdays before the beginning of the new administrative work week that it was making the change and that it considered it to be “covered-by” the current agreement’s provision stating, “The Agency will notify the union no less than 48 hours before it wishes to implement a shift change and take any union objections into account.” Consequently, the agency saw no need to negotiate over the impact.
QUESTION: What, if any, violations have been committed here and what is the appropriate remedy. Continue reading
And you thought this could not get any scarier? It appears Trump is a better student of history than we all thought because he just reached back about 90 years to replicate the maneuvers of a similar infamous figure of history. Trump’s EEOC has demanded that the University of Pennsylvania create and turn over membership rosters for the Jewish Studies Program and Jewish and Jewish-affiliated campus organizations, plus personal contact information and addresses of the Jewish members. So, does anyone really doubt that he won’t soon insist that federal agencies provide similar information. Once he has all his Jews lined up in some nice little DOGE data file, will it really be long before he demands similar information on other religions, e.g., particularly those he does not approve of? (And God help you atheists.) Then the data on which feds are union members, which ones have ever filed an EEO complaint, etc. The ACLU is trying to stop this at UPenn. Union leaders would be wise to start listening for any evidence that The Orange One is make similar demands in their agency.
Thought you might find helpful a new DOL note on how partial-week weather-related closures count toward FMLA leave. While DOL has no regulatory control over the civil service, OPM usually follows its advice. Sometimes that is good for employees; sometimes it is not so good.
Whether due to the shutdown, holidays or your “use or lose” leave, you may have missed a few of the more important pieces we have posted since October 1 concerning Civil Rights and Labor Relations.
Civil Rights
Labor Relations
If you have not been in the District lately due to some use or lose leave or to treat a year-long migraine, you should know that the President is in the process of a self-loving frenzy renaming lots of the buildings and locations where you work. So, we thought we would look ahead to what is likely to happen next. That should get you ready for when the guys with the gold lettering show up unannounced at your federal worksite to change the name of your work site. Happy New Year! Continue reading
Those of us actually engaged in the practice of employee rights accepted long ago that an employee’s time traveling to and from a location where s/he provides covered FMLA assistance is covered as FMLA leave. President Trump’s staff, however, thought we all needed to hear something from our dear leader’s own people to allow this. Maybe all that dust and flying asbestos from ripping down the east wing confused them enough to think we were just as confused as those White House intellects. In any event, they just issued an opinion letter on the issue. Jeff Nowak, who may be America’s leading thinker about FMLA just posted a piece on his blog addressing the issue. Even though he writes for employers, we find his advice for union reps as well. So, we suggest you click over to his latest “FMLA Insight” post for some helpful information.
If you know of some employees who have been denied FMLA leave for their travels, now is as good a time as any to contact them and file a grievance. Given that an agency could be liable for tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees if it forces the union to arbitrate for even an hour of retroactive FMLA leave, these dispute should settle easily.
As the year ends, many unions are filing their annual LM-2 reports outlining their financial situations. One of the most prominent federal employee union to do so, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), is showing a bump as big as Octomom’s. Line 20 of its latest report shows that in comparison to last year’s report it has added about 12,000 new members for about a 14% increase. WOW! We would love to attribute it to the superb legal work by the more than 80 lawyers it employs, or the hundreds of dedicated local chapter leaders. But in fairness the biggest thing that happened to NTEU this year is Trump’s revenge-driven executive order to take collective bargaining rights away from most of the union’s bargaining units. While I was worried that the EO would be the beginning of the end for NTEU and other unions, it is thrilling to see Trump’s spiteful order blow up in his face. It appears that it drove thousands of federal employees in only about a dozen agencies to admit that unions, not Trump or his political party posse, have their best interest at the top of their agenda. Let’s hope this is only the first of many great LM-2 reports.
An HHS employee, Ileana, alleged that she was sexually harassed by the Agency’s Deputy Director (DD), who touched her leg, rubbed her shoulders, stared at her chest, looked down her blouse, and repeatedly asked her out to lunch and dinner. She maintained that she rebuffed DD’s advances and told him to stop his behavior, but he did not do so. She further alleged that when she rebuffed his advances, DD punished her by assigning her extra duties, refusing her requests for training, assigning her duties outside her position description. Finally, she alleged that DD would often call Complainant into his office to “vent” which often resulted in DD throwing pencils and pens across the room. What did EEOC do about it once it upheld her charges? It imposed an order that included five kinds of remedies. First, … Continue reading