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
I was born into a family of union activists and devoted over 40 years of my own life to working for unions, but there are a few things about them that truly “get my goat”—to say it politely. I have touched on them in some of the roughly 1,400 FEDSMILL posts I have issued since 2011, but thought it might remove any doubt about my biases if I put them together in one piece. Continue reading
Why? Because for years the agency discriminated against them when performance awards were handed out. If your union is not doing a simple statistical analysis of how awards are distributed among the various protected classes of employees each year, it is not doing its job. Why do we call it simple? Because it is. All one need do is plug as few as four numbers into a free, on-line calculator and click “Calculate.” (Check out the Fedsmill post entitled, “How to Measure Management Unfairness” for a step-by-step guide.) Seconds later the app will spit out a multi-page report. If its conclusion is that there is evidence of discrimination, then the union should bring in some experts to help it move the case to the next stage. They could be folks on the union staff or your union might have to contact a law firm like the one that handled this case for AFGE. Check out the FEDSMILL post entitled, “When Agency Awards Discriminate”
It is something the pro-employee White House is urging federal agencies to adopt—and that means your union should be pursuing implementation of the President’s order ASAP lest. The best explanation of this concept was issued by FEDweek in a recent post entitled, “OPM Instructs Agencies on Granting ‘Safe Leave’ for Victims of Violence or Harassment.” Check out the link and get your union moving.
When employees are the victim of discrimination, they often have some unusual rights that a union rep might not think of when working out a remedy for a grievant. For example, EEOC issued a recent decision in which it found an agency at fault for reassigning an employee victim away from a discriminating manager and her normal work location as a way to remedy a violation of her rights. The Commission wrote, “An employer does not act responsibly in response to a hostile work environment allegation when it reassigns the alleged victim. “ In another new decision EEOC actually ordered the agency to reassign the offending supervisor away from the employee—not the other way around. The decisions are cited below. Continue reading
In our experience, gag orders or anything like that used to stop someone from talking about “bad stuff” that may be happening at the job are terrible. FEDSWEEK just wrote a short piece on how gag orders imposed on federal employees can violate the law. If your co-workers are under a formal order—or even an unwritten practice/expectation in a single work unit—barring them from discussing problems with anyone other than their supervisor, then the union should think seriously about going after it by teaming up with the office of Special Counsel. The FEDSWEK piece is entitled, “OSC Stresses Restrictions on ‘Gag Orders’ against Federal Employees.”
One thing we try to do at Fedsmill is to make union reps aware of new issues developing in the employee and labor rights areas. For now, we will just call your attention to this article from Forbes entitled, “What Employers Should Know About Menopause Discrimination.” While written for employers, it provides a good initial overview of what this issue involves. Think about bringing this to the attention of all your members because providing useful information to BU employees is one of the most valued services a union can perform. If your national union is not yet talking about the issue, ask why.
Here are the facts. See if you can figure out two things the union did wrong. The agency had a practice of placing a guard at each of its strategically important locations around its property every shift. When it suddenly changed that by requiring one staff person to cover two strategic locations per shift rather than one, the union charged management with violating the contract. The clause at issue read as follows: “The Employer agrees to lower inherent hazards to employees to the lowest level possible without relinquishing its management rights. A ‘strategic location’ is defined as a self-contained area and can only be safely secured by a single officer.” The union grievance asked for a return to the prior staffing level and that is what the arbitrator ordered. However, FLRA overturned the award saying that it intruded too heavily on management’s right to assign work. Have you identified the two errors yet? Continue reading
Every so often we hear from a union officer trying to settle a grievance asking whether s/he can cut out of the deal anyone no longer in the unit, agency, or even federal government. For example, suppose an agency refused to pay 50 unit employees public transit subsidies one fiscal year despite a contract entitlement at the rate of $200 a month. If the union filed a mass grievance on October 15, 2004 that covered all 50 harmed employees and it took nine years to settle that case (October 15, 2013) after all the grievance steps, multiple arbitration hearings, FLRA exceptions, etc. it is very likely only half of the original 50 were still in the bargaining unit then. Continue reading
We have posted about a half-dozen articles complaining about how fed unions do an absolutely terrible, if not immoral, job protecting staff members not covered by the staff’s collective bargaining unit. (See the list of them below.) These non-unit staffers are the proverbial sitting ducks who can have their income and vital benefits cut off in an instant if an elected union leader is in a bad mood, wants to strut his/her power, needs someone to blame for the leader’s own screw-up, or is just wallowing in paranoia. It is a toss-up as to whether it is more embarrassing that non-unit staffers have fewer rights to challenge a dismissal than the unit employees they supervise have or that the managers in the federal agencies they represent have. So, we thought we would show you a policy statement protecting non-unit union staff and ask if you can identify which union has adopted it—or even whether your own union has. Continue reading