Laborradio.org just reported that the AFGE Council of locals in the Environmental Protection Administration has settled a grievance for $35 million in retroactive overtime pay. EPA management had told these employees they were not covered by the overtime laws–when they were. The union stood up for them and worked this dispute for nearly six years before management relented. This is another fine example of a union protecting employees when many of them did not even know they were being cheated. It is unclear what this will mean for those EPA employees not represented by AFGE.
Hats off to AFGE for its recently published article revealing who gets paid the most–millions actually– to do government work. It is not who you think, and you will never hear about this story on FOX, from Rush, or around the Koch brothers’ household. It is a “gotta read” piece so that you can share the facts with friends, family and just plain folks when they take shots at the overpaid public employees. Here is a hint. With the income just one of the guys receives from your taxes, 400 more federal GS employees could be hired by the Social Security Administration to clear the backlog of disability claims, the VA to help vets, the SEC to clean up Wall Street, or the IRS to catch all the folks hiding assets in overseas bank accounts.
Here’s a hint. It is someone over 40 years old. Need another hint? It is also someone who applied for promotion. Still stumped? It is someone who got the promotion instead of a substantially older applicant who wants to file an age discrimination allegation. EEOC and the courts have recognized that even when everyone applying for a particular promotion is over 40, disappointed candidates might have an age discrimination case if the selectee is over 40 but substantially younger than they are. Age discrimination does not require that the selectee (or selecting official) be under 40 years old. Continue reading
OPM, FLRA, and the courts may be highly reluctant to order an agency to disclose a crediting plan to a grievant or the union, but EEOC is not. It has addressed the issue over a dozen times and developed a good body of case law that the Authority should draw from to deal with this disclosure issue. Continue reading
Whether it is the union or management refusing to participate and whether it is a grievance arbitration or an interest arbitration, the answer is the same. It is a very big mistake and you will likely regret it—a lot. The Authority has repeatedly ruled that if a party refuses to participate in an arbitration hearing that was properly scheduled, it commits an unfair labor practice. Of more immediate significance is … Continue reading
FLRA’s newest decision announced that in the future it will typically adopt a union request that an agency guilty of a ULP be required to send all involved employees an e-mail announcing its guilt and promising to not violate the law again. In the past, the Authority would only order that in extraordinary or non-traditional cases, e.g., repeated serious violations by an agency. However, in AFGE 67 FLRA 221 it changed its mind largely because wall-mounted bulletin boards, the traditional location of FLRA paper-postings, have “… gone the way of the telephone-message pad and the interoffice envelope .” The Authority ended its decision by emphasizing three points. Continue reading
Newly-minted Member Pizzella has launched his FLRA career by largely lecturing the labor-management community on his loyalty to the fight against government waste. His latest sermonette (delivered as a concurring opinion in AFGE, 67 FLRA 218) condemns an AFGE local for wasting government resources by filing exceptions to an arbitration decision it lost. He specifically wrote that based on his personal opinion that the odds were greatly against the union winning before FLRA, “It is unlikely that Congress envisioned that such futile endeavors would ‘contribute to the effective conduct of [the government’s] business’ or facilitate the ‘amicable settlement of disputes.’” Continue reading
Then you will have to build a strong case because the courts and most employers are far from sold on the idea. Employees and unions are in the process of breaking new ground to get this idea widely accepted and there are three documents that can help them build a case for a disabled employee. Continue reading
No, they are not. So, if an employee traveling to work fell and broke both legs, forcing him into bed for six weeks and limiting his walking for seven more months was fired due to being unavailable to work before 2008, the ADA did nothing for him. But, the ADA was replaced with the Americans With Disabilities Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA), and under the new statute the employee is protected. Continue reading