DO IT LIKE BEZOS DID

Those looking to build membership in their union can learn a very important lesson from recalling how Jeff Bezos built Amazon from a single product bookstore into a mega-retailer. The short answer is that while he could have made a comfortable living just selling books he knew that not everyone was interested in buying books. The secret to attracting more customers was in offering different kinds of products because each product brought a new constituency into the Amazon jungle. While unions can scrap along focusing on just two or three issues members are interested in, such as only grieving disciplinary actions, overtime denials, and evaluation issues, that is not going to get them an Amazonian “market share” of the bargaining unit. The more workplace issues that a union monitors, analyzes and enforces the more issue constituencies it is going to arose and attract. So, we thought we would share some of the many kinds of grievances we have been involved in that brought in new members. Hopefully, the list will trigger some new ideas for your representational efforts.

A Benefit Termination – One agency unilaterally terminated its policy of reimbursing employees for a portion of their children’s college tuition. Because the vast majority of employees who took advantage of that benefit were over 40, we charged the agency not just with a ULP, but also age discrimination.  An arbitrator agreed and reinstated the program retroactively.

Contracting Out– When an agency contracted out some work, it moved the employees previously doing that work to a related task in the same work branch and promised that there would be no change in working conditions.  However, we soon saw that these employees were no longer getting regular amounts of overtime. We grieved a unilateral change issue and got them retroactive overtime pay because the agency misled us about the change to overtime opportunities.

Schedule Changes – An agency decided to stop assigning employees to shifts that started at the same time each day of the work week. Instead, it assigned starting times that differed almost every day of the week. This wrecked misery among the single parents. When the union could not prove this was a ULP, we grieved alleging it violated federal statute (5 USC 6101) and regulation (5 CFR 610) to do so without justifying economic analyses for the unusual scheduling. Since the agency never did any analysis, it was required to reinstate the old shifts and to pay employees retroactive overtime pay for each hour of a workday they worked outside their previous regular schedule. This paid off with hundreds of millions in back pay.

HQI/QSI Unfairness – As part of the union’s statistical review of how a large agency distributed High Quality Step Increases, we found that women and minorities were being passed over for these salary increases while males and White employees with the same scores were getting them.  We grieved alleging discrimination and settled for a few hundred retroactive HQI’s and negotiating an objective formula for the merit step increases, i.e., if you scored at a certain level you got the extra step increase. This case led to similar successful challenges to many agency award systems.

Promotion Criteria – After negotiating a very detailed process for ranking promotion candidates, the agency HR leader decided to slip a small addition into the process without negotiating with us.  He thought that with such a thorough negotiated process the agency had the right to unilaterally fill the gaps where the parties did not specify details. We charged the agency with a unilateral change ULP as well as a violation of the negotiated process and 5 CFR 300.103. That last issue involved the agency creating a new promotion criterion without any validation.  We won and as a result the agency had to award priority consideration to over 1,400 employees who were disadvantaged by the unilateral modification.

Critical Element Wiggle – When a new executive took over a division of an agency, she instructed managers to apply an existing critical element differently than they had in the past.  She refused to negotiate with the union claiming that the wording of the critical element remained unchanged. We grieved alleging a unilateral change in working conditions and the arbitrator ordered to agency to go back and redo the evaluation of every employee in the division, which was well over 1,000, for the last two years using the prior interpretation of the element.  Moreover, she ruled that if an employee’s score was improved the employee was to be given whatever benefits that improved merited, e.g., priority consideration, a retroactive incentive award, etc.

Discriminatory Discipline System – In an agency that issued thousands of disciplinary actions a year, we noticed that Black employees seemed to be disciplined more often than others.  When we got our hands on the data, we found the agency disciplined Black employees three times as often as it did White employees.  So, we filed a grievance alleging systematic discrimination in how the discipline system was administered. We settled for significant changes in how the agency would help employees avoid discipline in the future.

Interview Inequities – The contract required selecting officials to treat all candidates for promotion or selection uniformly. Once we found that outside candidates were getting interviewed by the selecting officials, but on-board employees were not, we grieved charging a violation of the uniformity clause.  The arbitrator sided with us and awarded hundreds of priority considerations.

Early Retirement Abuse – An agency decided that due to looming budget problems it was going to offer an early retirement option to certain employees who it otherwise expected to RIF. Employees took the deal, but more than a few were unhappy because they would have preferred to stay while they knew of co-workers who would have preferred to take the retirement incentive. Since the agency unilaterally decided who would be offered the retirement incentive, the union grieved the ULP issue.  The agency had to offer reinstatement to those who wanted to come back and retroactive pay.

Manager Discretion– An agency abolished the nationwide system for assigning overtime in favor of giving each individual manager around the country the power to decide how to dole out overtime in his/her own office. When the union was unable to stop the change nationally, it advised local representatives to watch for local managers implementing their own on-going formula without bargaining with the union.  When managers did, the union charged them with unilateral implementation. It proved that if individual managers were going to implement their own ongoing policies or practices rather than use pure discretion then they had to bargain before implementing. The union won millions in retroactive overtime money for employees.

Older workers, overtime hawks, minorities, those chasing promotions, near retirees, top performers, single parents, women, etc.  There is probably not one single workplace issue (or even two or three) that all of those groups have a strong interest in.  To motivate membership out of each group a union must make itself very relevant to them. Jeff did it by offering everything from arts & crafts to pharmaceuticals. Over 176 million people pay him dues via Amazon Prime membership just in case they want to buy something from him.