That is what AFGE calls their 2023 booklet designed to help new (and not so new) local union leaders figure out how to handle all their responsibilities. It is well-done and AFGE deserves compliments for making their material available to the world, rather than treating their experience and wisdom as some secret shared only with the most favored members.
Well, if the Customs & Border Protection supervisors did not know about their lactation obligations they will soon. EEOC just ordered the agency to “ provide at least eight (8) hours of interactive in-person EEO training to all managers at Laredo Port of Entry Field Office and World Trade Bridge on responsibilities under Title VII with respect to the treatment of female employees and their ability to utilize the agency’s Lactation Support Program in a non-discriminatory manner as well as the prohibition against other forms of disparate treatment.” Why? Continue reading
Often an employer must adjust an employee’s performance standards once it approves the employee’s FMLA leave request. Not long ago a Federal Circuit Court spelled it out for LR practitioners on both sides of the table. Continue reading
What if you want to file a grievance and a ULP with FLRA over the same incident? For example, suppose you want to challenge a member’s suspension as a violation of the contract and an act of union animus. For decades there were clear, objective rules for when you could do that. During the last President’s anti-union administration, they were replaced with a totally subjective, eye-of-the-biased-beholder process. It is time to restore the more predictable rules for practitioners, but the question is how given that the legal question only arises in the normally unappealable arbitration exception process. Here is our suggestion. Continue reading
Private law firms are taking in bundles of attorney fees representing federal employees in EEO complaints. This is money unions could be collecting along with the positive publicity of tangibly helping an employee if only they would allege EEO violations more often in grievances. In a case issued last week, we saw how the employee won a retroactive promotion based on facts she was unaware of (and one that did not exist) when she filed the charge. Continue reading
If you sit on a lot of bargaining teams and especially if you serve as the union’s chief spokesperson, this is important for you. As the title states, FLRA has made several significant changes to the negotiability process. For now, the best place to get a sense of what it has done is its press release. We have always seen agency assertions of non-negotiability as opening a pandora’s box of trouble for the agency if the union takes advantage of all its tactical negotiability options. For a sense of what those options are, check out “Test yourself #2- Strategic Negotiability Decisions.”
Ernest Dubester led a one-man unprecedented campaign to stop what was probably the most unethical reign of anti-union revenge the FLRA ever witnessed. But he was only one vote against those of two others who were pledged to punishing unions and employees for voting for the wrong people. So, generally the best he could do was deliver well-reasoned dissenting opinions and hope the courts would reverse the majority opinions–which they often did. But we at FEDSMILL look at those dissents as bright spotlights on the provisions of the labor law warning of their potential for political abuse–like a Bat Signal. Without a change in the statute, it will take a bundle of creative union strategies to insult them and employees from further abuse in the future. For example,… Continue reading
The FLRA has said that it “specifically distinguished between contractual back pay recovery periods and contractual time periods for filing grievances.” Consequently, we practitioners had better know the difference, particularly when we sit down to write a labor agreement. Here are a few comments that we think will help them the most. Continue reading
About two weeks ago we posted about how the Governor of Florida is threatening to “slit the throat” of federal employees if he is elected president. Yet, as I write this, thousands of federal employees are scrambling to help the citizens of Florida deal with a storm the likes of which has not been seen there in over 100 years. Their work also will likely save the governor from the potential political backlash this storm’s damage will do. Will the governor praise them, thank them, or even recognize them for doing what he and his state employee cannot do. ABSOLUTELY NOT! Will he claim credit for their good work? ABSOLUTELY! Here is a short list of which feds are at the heart of the rescue effort in Florida:
All they will all do it for a guy who promises to gut their agencies’ budgets, unemploy them, and damage their families’ futures. WHAT A CLASSY GUY THAT GOVERNOR IS!