NOW THIS IS A WHOPPER…

of a remedy that union reps should keep in mind when drafting grievances, especially those that allege an EEO violation. It is the kind of remedy order that opens up the mind as to what is possible through a grievance. EEOC ordered the agency to do 13 different things after allowing a manager to discriminate and retaliate against an employee for raising EEO allegations. Here is the EEOC order in its own words. See if any of these remedies are things you never would have thought of. Continue reading

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5 COMMON TYPES OF REASONABLE ACCOMMODATIONS

Looking through the blogs posted by law firms representing federal employees, we ran across a useful post from PINESFEDERAL, a firm operating out of D.C., Houston and Atlanta. Fedsmill has posted a ton of material on reasonable accommodations, but we liked how this firm covered the issue simply.  In a perfect world, this is a piece that a union would forward to all its members or prospective members to alert them as to a benefit they may not even know they are entitled to. If your union experience is like mine, you have seen that most employees have no idea of all the rights they have.  We can thank the American education system for demanding high school students learn more about the War of the Roses than the laws in place to benefit them over the next 40+ years of their life. In any event, here is the post we recommend you forward to all stewards if no one else.

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DEFENDING FEDERAL EMPLOYEES IN PIP CASES

From time to time, we scan the blogs of various law firms that specialize in representing federal employees and find very useful information.  So, we thought we would start passing on links to these  posts.  We are kicking off this effort with a piece from the firm of Berry & Berry, located just outside D.C in Northern Virginia. Their post has the same title of this post and you can find it here.

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TWO FEDS GET SHARE OF $1.7 MILLION FINE AGAINST CHEATING CONTRACTORS

Private contractors are everywhere in government because a bundle of politicians believe that private sector firms can always do the work faster, better, and cheaper than federal employees.  I could give you a list as long as my arm of studies and cases where that was shown to be wildly untrue, but the politicians love the campaign contributions contractors send with the money they get from federal contractors.  In any event, federal employees are in the best position to spot when contractors are padding their bills or otherwise defrauding the government. Consequently, while they should know that when they do they can get a share of the fine the government imposes on the contractor, the first step is to make sure stewards know about this.  After all, they are most likely to hear co-workers talking about any contractor rip-offs. So, we thought we would pass along a post from The Employment Law Group, a law firm operating in D.C., that wrote about how it got two federal employees big bucks for blowing the whistle on some contractor games. Check out the short piece here.

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NLRB STOMPS ON EMPLOYER’S CONFIDENTIALITY & NON-DISCLOSURE ENFORCEMENT

Lots of employer’s try to gag what employees or former employees can say about it, but it turns out that if that interferes with employees’ labor law rights, the NLRB is going to jump on that.  For example, in a case titled Harper Holdings, the Board convinced the employer to stop enforcing the following policies—formal or informal. Continue reading

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BIG VICTORY FOR RELIGIOUSLY OBSERVANT FEDS

Bret, a Jew, told his agency that his faith requires him to forgo work on the Sabbath, which runs from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. Despite that, management scheduled him to work some weekends and when he did not show up the agency fired him.  Here are the defenses the agency raised that were rejected. To begin, it claimed that the union contract prevented it from offering several accommodations, but … Continue reading

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REINSTATEMENT & FRONT PAY AFTER REMOVAL FOR 840 HOURS OF AWOL/LWOP 

Let’s count the mistakes the FBI made in terminating this employee (Emmitt) who had asked for a disability-related reasonable accommodation. First, the employee’s supervisor showed up at his house unannounced while the employee was on sick leave to do a “welfare check.” This somehow also involved also taking the employee’s service weapon and inspecting his bedroom.  She then told his mother management thought Emmitt was lying about being sick. To make the visit truly memorable, she mocked him to his face. Second, …  Continue reading

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WHAT SHOULD NOT HAPPEN WHEN YOU CALL IN SICK

I’ll bet that what happened in this recent case is very, very common. An employee, Jade, called in to say she needed to be hospitalized due to stomach pains and needed an appointment she had scheduled for that day reassigned.  A supervisor (OS) other than the employee’s own took the call and told the employee’s mentor (CTE) about the stomach pains.  And then she shared the information with another supervisor. The mentor told two other non-supervisory employees, who then called Jade.  Jade filed a discrimination complaint alleging that sharing her medical information violated the Rehabilitation Act and EEOC just ordered the agency to figure out how big of a check to send her for that violation. Here is why. Continue reading

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GREAT PODCAST ABOUT “ASSOCIATIONAL DISCRIMINATION”

Got 15 minutes?  If so, we suggest you checkout this podcast about a kind of discrimination that most of us never hear about. It will help you when union members suffer any of a very wide range of adverse management actions because they have a relationship with a disabled person. We have written about this before in posts such as the following:

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ARE YOU GETTING PREPARED?

Feds prosper or suffer depending on who is in the White House.  With at least the potential for a very anti-federal union and federal employee taking over a year from now, unions should be taking a number of steps now to protect themselves from its well-known tactics. One of those steps is to change the arbitration article in their agreements.  Continue reading

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