Posted on December 11, 2019 by AdminUN

WHEN TO TELL THE FSIP TO TAKE A LEAP – Revised

Mark Carter has been a faithful lapdog of the rightwing community that seeks to bankrupt and otherwise crush unions. He has maintained the practice of finding against unions 90% of the time which began during the Bush W. Administration. (By way of comparison, during the Clinton and Obama Administration FSIP only found against agencies about 50% of the time.)  Mark has shown there is no level too low to which he is willing to bend to screw over a union, thinking there is nothing unions can do about it.  But there are several reasons why employees, screwed over by the Panel just because they are union supporters, can tell Mark and his extremist posse to “bugger off,” “pound sand,” “take a leap,” etc. Continue reading →

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Posted on December 11, 2019 by AdminUN

ANOTHER REASON TO REDUCE ATTORNEY FEES.

EEOC just declared again that, as outlined in MD-110, an award of attorney’s fees “may be reduced where the quality of representation was poor, the attorney’s conduct resulted in undue delay or obstruction of the process, or where settlement likely could have been reached much earlier but for the attorney’s conduct.” This issue arose in a reasonable accommodation case filed to get the employee one more day of telework a week where the employee’s attorneys said that 16 attorneys and 22 paralegals did work on the case. We would have slashed the fees for that reason alone.  But the agency did not seem to argue such a massive division of labor was reasonable for what otherwise looks like a straight-forward case.  (Remember, although we at Fedsmill strongly support reasonable fees for employee and union attorneys, we have said for a while excessive, absurd demands are going to kill this proverbial golden egg laying goose.) Rather, the Commission upheld reducing the fees because the attorneys’ behavior delayed closure of the case. Agencies are going to jump all over this reason for reducing fees because often the attorney’s behavior is unreasonable.  For example, Continue reading →

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Posted on December 3, 2019 by AdminUN

FIVE UNION RIGHTS YOU MAY NOT REMEMBER

We all know that union activists cannot be fired, denied a benefit, or even poorly evaluated if the decision is based on or even related to their choice to be union activist.  But over the years FLRA has certified that union leaders have a few other rights that you might have forgotten about.  So, FEDSMILL.com thought you a reminder of them would help along with excerpts from the precedential FLRA case. Continue reading →

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Posted on December 2, 2019 by AdminUN

WHEN MANAGERS EVALUATE BASED ON ONLY A SAMPLE OF YOUR WORK.

Pass this on to Unit Members: Managers cannot legally just select a few cases or days you worked on during the year to write your annual evaluation. The law, regulations and lots of union contracts contain rules managers must follow to ensure the sample is reasonable and representative.  For example, the U. S. Merit Systems Protection Board has issued final decisions addressing what constitutes a legally adequate sample of an employee’s work:
Continue reading →

Posted in Performance | Tagged | 1 Comment

Posted on November 19, 2019 by AdminUN

DISMISSED PROBATIONER GETS 8 YEARS BACK PAY & BENEFITS

Pass This On To Unit Members: Can a probationary employee appeal his/her termination?  You bet s/he can.  In fact, there are more than a dozen different arguments a probationer can raise.  Your union rep can fill you in on them. But in the most recent victory for a probationer, the employee established that Social Security managers violated his rights under USERRA or the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. As a preference eligible veteran, the employee’s probationary period was only one year as opposed to the normal two years.  This office of SSA uses a less demanding performance standard to evaluate the employee’s first year than it does for the second and subsequent years. As the end of the one year approached,… Continue reading →

Posted in Probation Period | Tagged | 2 Comments

Posted on November 19, 2019 by AdminUN

UNION REP TEST#2 (EEO- Religious Accommodation)

QUESTION: An employee calls her union rep, you, on the phone to ask if anything can be done to help her comply with the demands of her faith.  She practices Islam and is at a point in her religious life where she is now required to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. She needs to be absent for about three weeks, even though she only has two weeks of annual leave available. However, her manager has refused to let her go at all. The manager says it is one of the very busy times of the year for the location in which she works and she is among the top producers in the office.  Is there anything you can do for her besides ask the manager to reconsider? Continue reading →

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Posted on November 17, 2019 by AdminUN

FED EX FLIPS FEDS THE BIRD

The New York Times just published a headline story entitled, “How Fed Ex Cut Its Tax Bill to Zero.” But we think a better title for the federal employee community would be the one we led with above. After all, Fed Ex could not earn a dime if federal tax money was not massively pumped into maintaining the roads their trucks drive on nor on operating what is the most efficient air traffic control system in the world.  Since Fed Ex opened its doors, hundreds of billions of tax dollars have gone into those two national assets so that Americans and American commerce could benefit. On top of those are other benefits Fed Ex reaps from tax dollars, e.g., the DoD training of pilots that the company ultimately hires, the airports tax dollars built and maintain, the deliveries the Post Office does for Fed Ex because it cannot earn a profit going to remote locations, the millions spent by the federal government itself using Fed Ex to deliver its own packages, etc. All federal employee should feel offended by Fed Ex stiffing our national treasury and making their jobs that much harder due to inadequate resources.  Fed Ex is not the only big corporation that is exploiting the system, but it is one that feds in every government office in the country could send a message when they decide how to route their express mail. After all, if a conglomerate chooses not to support federal operations why should feds support it?

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Posted on November 14, 2019 by AdminUN

25 MANAGEMENT ACTIONS FEDERAL EMPLOYEES COMMONLY GRIEVE

PASS ME ON TO UNIT MEMBERS– You may never have filed a grievance challenging a management decision, but thousands of federal employees do each year and many get the corrective action they wanted—whether it be new jobs, back pay, retroactive leave, respect, or something else. Here is a list of the 25 management decisions that federal employees grieve most often. Continue reading →

Posted in Grievance/Arbitration, Pass Me On | Tagged | 1 Comment

Posted on November 14, 2019 by AdminUN

UNION REP TEST #1 (LR- Remedies)

QUESTION: An employee stops her union rep, you, in the cafeteria to report that her manager will no longer let her telework the three days a week she has for the last year. He has limited her to one day a week. When the rep asks her why the manager did this, the employee reports that the manager told her his new third line manager has asked everyone to cut back on telework. The rep went on to check if any of the grounds in the contract for decreasing telework applied and assured himself none did. The employee said she would agree to file a grievance, but only if the remedy was worthwhile.  Otherwise, she would prefer to stay on the manager’s good side to see if she can change his mind over time.  Which of the following remedies can the union get from an arbitrator for the employee under law?

  1. A cease and desist order returning her to three days a week of telework,
  2. Reimbursement for the cost of coming to work on the two telework days a week denied her,
  3. Overtime for the time she spent traveling to work on the two telework days denied her,
  4. An order that she be allowed to telework three days a week for the next 12 months, and/or
  5. Reinstatement of any annual or sick leave the employee took because she was not teleworking.

Continue reading →

Posted in Test Yourself, Union Rep Test | Tagged | Leave a comment

Posted on November 8, 2019 by AdminUN

WHY FEDSMILL WILL EXISTS EVEN AFTER THE 1,000 POSTS TO DATE

Although management usually has more power than employees, a union rep with expert knowledge of what law, regulation and contract already entitled employees to and who knows multiple ways to solve the same problem can tame that power substantially. Given that most unions do little to tell its local officers and stewards about developments stemming from cases other than their own union’s work, Fedsmill tries to keep those folks up to date on developments no matter which union or venue generates the developments. Moreover, one of the great failings of the American education system is that it does not spend six seconds over the first 18 years of a citizen’s life educating them on the employment laws, regulations, and practices that will control the next 50 or so years they will spend in the work force.  In contrast, hours are spent on such “vital” life skills as the Peloponnesian War, … Continue reading →

Posted in Union Administration | Tagged | 2 Comments