If you want to know, click into their web site every week or so to see. It is entitled CHCOC.gov and contains transmittals that have been sent around among them. Some of them address topic we should keep track of, e.g., Keeping the Workforce Healthy During Flu Season, Enhanced Workplace Flexibilities, and HR Flexibilities for Severe Weather.
We just noticed that the TSA council posted a Dept. of Labor report last month showing that it has over 15,000 members. That is great news for the employees of that unit, AFGE, and the rest of us union supporters. Congrats and kudos. AFGE is obviously delivering on the promises it made those employees. AFGE fought long and hard to get that unit. You might remember the bruising battle against NTEU that cost the two unions an amount measured in the tens of millions to wage. Then AFGE had the even tougher fight against management to get a contract. We could not be happier for you.
Every federal sector contract has an arbitration clause, but a lot of them have not changed much in decades despite a raft of problems with the process, e.g., slow arbitrators, FLRA reversals of arbitrators, refined agency delay tactics, etc. Consequently, we want to share some thoughts on how to modernize these lumbering dinosaurs among the contract clauses. Continue reading
FLRA and the Air Force have an on-going disagreement over something known as aged comp time, which is comp time that remains unused at the time that the agency regulations required it be paid off and taken off the books. The Air Force believes that when it pays off this comp time it need only pay at a time and one-half rate of the employee’s hourly base pay rate. Employees, however, have argued and convinced arbitrators that their payments should include night shift differential because they would have received that when they originally worked the overtime. FLRA agreed with the employees and arbitrators, noting that even OPM had told Air Force to pay the differential, only to be ignored. Now Air Force not only gets to pay the night shift differential going back years, but it also must essentially double whatever that amount of money is because the arbitrator found that it had willfully violated the law. (See AFGE, 68 FLRA 102 (2014))
Although this one is about an old case, it is one you are likely to never uncover if looking for ways to solve a ULP problem. Everyone knows that a union can pursue a ULP allegation through FLRA or the grievance-arbitration route. But this case points out a very rarely used path that takes one into the Panel for resolution. In this case, NFFE, 2012 FSIP 053 (2012) filed a ULP charge against the agency claiming that it had unilaterally and illegally changed the tour of duty for some employees. It filed a ULP charge through the FLRA. Before the hearing it got the agency to agree that it had violated the law, but could not convince it to reimburse the employees for all the annual leave they had had to use on Saturday’s to cover their military reserve weekend duty. Typically, the union could accept settle the case without a remedy or risk losing everything and push forward to a hearing on the allegation and the remedy. In this case, however, NFFE and the agency agreed to “negotiate” over the remedy and if they could not reach agreement, let FSIP settle the dispute as it would any contract squabble. The Panel obviously agreed and it appears to have imposed the same remedy FLRA would have, e.g., a status quo ante order to reinstate the leave employees took. One advantage of using the Panel to settle these disputes is that their decisions are not reviewable. Had the union put the case before an ALJ or arbitrator either party could have appealed the decision to the FLRA and from there to the courts, delaying resolution for years. So, keep this one in mind the next time you are struggling to settle a ULP allegation.
But don’t look for a formal FLRA decision stating they are. Look instead at the reasoning FLRA used when ruling union crediting plan proposals were not negotiable. FLRA forces management to negotiate over something in one of two ways. The most well-known is by declaring a proposal negotiable via a formal negotiability decision. While many think that is the only way to force management to negotiate, seasoned negotiators know otherwise. FLRA also leaves agencies little choice but to negotiate when it rejects a union proposal because it fails to meet complex regulatory requirements associated with the proposal. Here is how that has worked with crediting plans. Continue reading
The labor law gives management the right to assign duties to a position, which totally prevents a union from proposing that the job be restructured for any purpose, e.g., greater efficiency, upward mobility, or even fairness. However, a union can force a redesign of the job’s duties if it can prove the status quo violates a law or makes the employer liable for damages. One of those laws that can force managers to restructure/reassign job duties is the ADAAA, as a federal circuit court just pointed out. Continue reading
There are several kinds of executive boards in the corporate and non-profit worlds ranging from the merely ceremonial rubber stamp varieties to those that engage in the active oversight management of the organization through standing subcommittees, extensive data access, and substantive check and balance powers. While there are exceptions to this observation, all too often the ceremonial rubber stamp board exists in one of two kinds of organizations. First, they are often found where an organization is newly created or recreated after an in-house fight and the top executive needs considerable leeway to stabilize the organization to get it on a growth path. The other place they are often found is with organizations that have made very serious strategic errors and are headed for disaster largely because the chief executive or even a small group of the executive’s direct reports are stuck in group-think trap or otherwise unable to break from their traditional perspective despite new facts, developments, etc. If you doubt that, look at the demise of such corporations as Enron, Lehman Bros., Blackberry, Kodak, Polaroid, etc. In contrast, healthy organizations that have passed through their formative struggles to succeed often shift to more active executive boards so that the single-minded vision of the CEO and his/her closest staff do not unintentionally limit, or even harm, the organization. Federal sector unions need to use their boards just as actively and creatively as any organization if they want to avoid the disadvantages of an all-powerful CEO or small leadership clique running the place. Below are some ideas for what union executive boards should be doing. Continue reading
There is an on-going fight between labor and management as to what is the correct remedy when a supervisor fails to give an employee an overtime assignment s/he was due under law and/or the contract. Management generally only wants to give the employee a make-up overtime assignment while the union asks for back pay without the need for the employee to work the actual hours. Check out NTEU, 67 FLRA 247 (2014). But there is a third option that we rarely hear discussed. Continue reading
Let’s start with a hypothetical. Assume that the local’s election of officers is coming up in three months and that the only member who can beat the current local president is waffling over whether he, Marvin, will run. Marvin is currently a steward. Who wins this election is important to the district business agent because she, Susan, and her boss want to see the current local president, Tom, put out of office. Tom has voted against the district and national leadership at recent conventions, regularly refused to follow their representational advice, signed bad local agreements, and publicly mocked the union’s national political endorsement for the nation’s President. So, the district business agent, a full-time employee of the union and not a member of the local in question, contacts Marvin to ask what she can do to convince Marvin to run. Continue reading