Congrats to AFGE for making available its guide for recruiting newly hired employees. There is probably no better time to recruiting an employee than during his or her first day or two on the job. If you do not already have an effective routine for doing this, borrow liberally from AFGE.
While this Administration seems to understand the economic value of federal employees doing work rather than turning government work into profit opportunities for private venture capitalists, that can change. Continue reading
We have no shortage of ideas to address on this site. But it would be hypocritical to have a motto urging management to respect employee and union insights if we did not do the same. So, we are asking for your suggestions about what information we could deliver that would be most helpful to you. At the end of this piece there is a place to leave comments. Just enter your suggested topics there and we will start working through them. We cannot guarantee that we will get to all of them or that we have the expertise to deal with each topic, but we would like to try.
There are lots of good reasons to be a union rep, whether you get involved in grievances, negotiations, arbitrations, employee meetings, or information gathering & analysis. Here are ten that we hope lead you to think about getting involved. Continue reading
Calling once again on the small army of lawyers it employs, NTEU has won two more Section 508 Rehabilitation Act discrimination cases. Continue reading
Loose lips not only sink ships, but they also violate employee rights. EEOC issued two decisions recently where it could not have made it clearer that managers are not to talk about employee EEO complaints. Continue reading
Another kind of discrimination management must avoid is anti-union animus or discrimination. Title 5 USC 7116(a)(2) makes it an unfair labor practice for management “to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization by discrimination in connection with hiring, tenure, promotion, or other conditions of employment.” Consequently, if there are any reasons to believe that the grievant was not selected because of her union activity the union should charge management with this ULP violation in the grievance. If the grievant is a union representative, the union should level this charge unless it is certain that it could not be true. That protects it while it obtains the promotion file and investigates during the grievance. Continue reading
If the union levels charges of discrimination in a non-selection grievance, it substantially increases its chances of winning. So great is the advantage that FEDSMILL believes the union should level a discrimination charge in a non-selection grievance unless it is positive it will not help it. Here’ s why. Continue reading
Ask a manager if you can grieve non-selection from a BQ list and you are likely to hear that you can’t. Some of them will even quote part of a federal regulation that bars grievances over non-selection from a “group of properly ranked and certified candidates.” (5 CFR 335.103(d)) But, there are ways to get around that, e.g., allege that the list was not properly ranked, certified, or considered. That may sound like hair-splitting, but it gets the union the right to grieve. There are five ways to do that successfully. Continue reading