Posted on February 19, 2024 by AdminUN

REINSTATEMENT & FRONT PAY AFTER REMOVAL FOR 840 HOURS OF AWOL/LWOP 

Let’s count the mistakes the FBI made in terminating this employee (Emmitt) who had asked for a disability-related reasonable accommodation. First, the employee’s supervisor showed up at his house unannounced while the employee was on sick leave to do a “welfare check.” This somehow also involved also taking the employee’s service weapon and inspecting his bedroom.  She then told his mother management thought Emmitt was lying about being sick. To make the visit truly memorable, she mocked him to his face. Second, …  Continue reading →

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Posted on February 13, 2024 by AdminUN

WHAT SHOULD NOT HAPPEN WHEN YOU CALL IN SICK

I’ll bet that what happened in this recent case is very, very common. An employee, Jade, called in to say she needed to be hospitalized due to stomach pains and needed an appointment she had scheduled for that day reassigned.  A supervisor (OS) other than the employee’s own took the call and told the employee’s mentor (CTE) about the stomach pains.  And then she shared the information with another supervisor. The mentor told two other non-supervisory employees, who then called Jade.  Jade filed a discrimination complaint alleging that sharing her medical information violated the Rehabilitation Act and EEOC just ordered the agency to figure out how big of a check to send her for that violation. Here is why. Continue reading →

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Posted on February 13, 2024 by AdminUN

GREAT PODCAST ABOUT “ASSOCIATIONAL DISCRIMINATION”

Got 15 minutes?  If so, we suggest you checkout this podcast about a kind of discrimination that most of us never hear about. It will help you when union members suffer any of a very wide range of adverse management actions because they have a relationship with a disabled person. We have written about this before in posts such as the following:

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Posted on February 5, 2024 by AdminUN

ARE YOU GETTING PREPARED?

Feds prosper or suffer depending on who is in the White House.  With at least the potential for a very anti-federal union and federal employee taking over a year from now, unions should be taking a number of steps now to protect themselves from its well-known tactics. One of those steps is to change the arbitration article in their agreements.  Continue reading →

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Posted on February 5, 2024 by AdminUN

MSPB CLARIFIES WHEN AN AGENCY CAN TERMINATE FOR LEAVE ABUSE

A GS-14 Supervisory Administrative Specialist at the SBA sustained a compensable injury requiring surgery and leave.  When she was cleared by her doctor to return to work, she requested a reasonable accommodation, including substantial approval of sick, annual, and LWOP to cover her future absences.  The agency denied most of her requested leave and by the time she returned to work she had accumulated 400 hours of AWOL. So, the agency removed her and the MSPB Administrative Judge (AJ) sustained the removal. But when the case went before the full Board, it reversed the judge and spelled out why as follows. This is a critically important case for any union rep defending an employee being disciplined for leave abuse.  Continue reading →

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Posted on February 1, 2024 by AdminUN

OUTSTANDING!!!  NFFE ACHIEVES 14% NET GROWTH IN 2023

 We at FEDSMILL have always believed that the most important measures of a union are its membership stats. If people are joining, then the union is obviously providing them the value they want.  If they are not, then in most cases it is because the union is not giving them what they want. That is more important than the percentage of arbitrations they win, the contract improvements they gain, or the legislative victories they rack up. If a union does great on each of those three measures, but people still do not join, then the union leadership is missing something.  That’s why NFFE members should celebrate Randy Erwin and his leadership team who have turned things around to achieve a growth rate every other federal employee envies. Check out the NFFE press release for more details.

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Posted on January 30, 2024 by AdminUN

WHAT IS ADEQUATE NOTICE OF CRIMINAL IMMUNITY?

The U. S Constitution permits a federal employees not to answer official questions put to them in any investigation proceeding, civil or criminal, formal or informal, when the answers might incriminate them in future criminal proceedings. Generally, an agency accomplishes this by giving the employees adequate notice both that they are subject to discharge for not answering and that their replies (and their fruits) cannot be employed against them in a criminal case. That is commonly known as a Kalkines right. But that leaves the question of what constitutes “adequate” notice of immunity. Continue reading →

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Posted on January 30, 2024 by AdminUN

WHAT IRS NOW KNOWS ABOUT “MISGENDERING” AND “DEADNAMING”

A GS-8 Contact Representative from Chamblee, Georgia just schooled the IRS on what these terms mean and why it is illegal to engage in them. “Deadnaming” is the practice of  … Continue reading →

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Posted on January 23, 2024 by AdminUN

THE OH SO ILLEGAL LOVE(?) LETTER

As EEOC tells it, a supervisor sent one of his employees female the following email: “Is this a Micro-aggression, me and Mikey were trying to decide? [m]an, you got a big b**ty for a white girl!!! LMAO [abbreviation for “laughing my a** off”]… [t]hought that would make you smile!! [h]ave an awesome day!” In a previous email he signed it “yo Daddy!”.  When she complained about this to higher management, the supervisor was reassigned away from her. But driven by what he thought were his romantic feelings  short-time later he handed her this letter after standing in front of her desk silent for a few minutes: Continue reading →

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Posted on January 23, 2024 by AdminUN

RETURNING TO A WORKABLE 7116(d) FORUM SELECTION ANALYSIS

Among the precedents the two Trump FLRA appointees destroyed was the Authority’s decades-long approach to objectively deciding whether a union can take “two bites at the apple.” This post is about how to get that reversed. The FLRA and courts have held for decades that the union could not use both the FLRA ULP and contract grievance processes to challenge an incident if (1) the ULP charge arose from the same set of factual circumstances as the grievance and (2) the theories advanced in support of both the ULP charge and grievance are substantially similar. The second element of that two-part analysis is reasonably objective. For example, if a union grieves a violation of a contract obligation to distribute overtime equitably and then files a ULP with FLRA charging the agency with unilaterally implementing a change in how it distributes overtime, those are different theories—and therefore previously permissible.  It was only where the grievance and ULP both claimed a statutory violation that the union violated 5 USC 7116(d). Continue reading →

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