Just thought we would share some in-house news we are excited about. FEDSMILL.com has been operating for a little over six months now and thanks to you we have a mailing list of subscribers and others of over 800 folks. Moreover, those 800 readers (and a few others who stumbled on us via Google or Bing) read about 5,000 pages a month. We started this to help union leaders all over the federal government and it seems like we are off to a good start thanks to you.
AFGE just filed its annual LM report revealing that the number of dues paying members rose by almost 9,000 over last year’s report for a total of 289,023 dues paying members. Continue reading
Score another one for all the Sunday church-going Christians in their battle to spend their Sabbath worshiping. This time DOD learned the hard way that it must offer a “reasonable accommodation” to allow employees to practice their religion and when they do not they can pay dearly. In this case more than $25,000 in damages. Continue reading
No, at least not directly. FLRA recently dismissed yet another Customs and Border Protection exception to an arbitration decision. (NTEU 66 FLRA 556) No news there. But this is another in a long line of cases where the agency LR leaders opposed giving the union attorney fees–and lost. By our estimate, this case will cost CBP about $75,000 in attorney fees given the high-priced legal talent at NTEU and how long LR managers dragged it out. All that money goes into funding more NTEU litigation. Continue reading
Did you know that if you turn in someone who is making false claims against the federal government you can get 15 to 25% of whatever the government recovers? For example, suppose you are aware that a private vendor is submitting false claims for payment and that those payments amount to over $100,000. Continue reading
EEOC recently put employers on notice that they may violate the law if they demand more education to compete for a job than is actually required to be successful. Here is their reasoning. Continue reading
Not long ago we posted an article about how frustrating it is when selecting officials will not give a best qualified candidate a substantive reason why he/she was passed over for promotion, especially when someone with a lower promotion score was selected. Although we did not advocate waterboarding the answer out of the selecting official, we expressed our understanding of those who dream about doing precisely that when told such things as he was “not sufficiently suited” for the job or that he “did not interview well.” In our original post we cited to three federal court decisions employees could cite as precedent for demanding a “clear and reasonably specific factual basis” for the decision. Now we have more cases to work with. Continue reading