A well-respected law firm just sent a legal memo out to its clients giving them a good overview of the right of disabled employees to bring service animals to the office or on the job. We recommend it for union reps if only to boost their optimism about helping disabled members. Check it out here.
The FEDSMILL board member with decades as a union chief negotiator has often explained to the rest of us why the chief spokesperson often needs to “not be nice” to the other side. In fact, he calls it a critical bargaining leadership skill. Now the Harvard Business Review has published some research making the same point. While we do not want to burst the bubbles of all the interest-based negotiations purists out there, they and all other negotiators would benefit from reading the HBR with the same title as this post.
While OPM is not bound to follow what the Department of Labor says about how to administer the FMLA, it almost always does. So, now that DOL has said private sector employees can use FMLA to attend these school meetings for their kids, federal employees should feel free to request FMLA leave for the events too. Check this out for a more detailed posting on the change.
The Administration and its finger puppets at FSIP are making it nearly impossible for unions to continue agreeing to bank time systems to represent employees. Ironically, they are also requiring agency executives to put their own necks and awards on the line even if they want to agree to a reasonable bank of time they know with certainty is necessary if it is more than an hour per year per unit employee. Consequently, as a big believer in Newton’s law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, it is virtually certain that unions will adjust their official time tactics to mute, if not mock, Trump’s orders. Here is one path they might take. Continue reading
A federal judge just shined a spotlight on a problem employees can encounter when they ask for FMLA leave as opposed to other kinds of leave. The judge said the agency was wrong to add extra notice or similar requirements for a FMLA request that do not apply to a request for annual or sick leave. The decision is not binding on federal agencies, but it should cause unions to question if their members’ agencies require onerous extra notices to get FMLA approved. Check out this law firm’s post about the case.
Union and agency negotiators started creating banks of time for union reps to use because it made a lot of sense for both sides. Management, for example, no longer had to make countless decisions on what was a reasonable amount of time for each incident the union rep worked on. Instead of approving a specific amount of time for the rep to draft an information request and another decision to attend a formal meeting and a third decision to interview a potential grievant and a fourth decision to review a notice of proposed change from the agency, management could let the rep manage his/her time against a hard cap. Another advantage was that it permitted unions to have one or two people handle all the union business rather than spreading the workload across maybe a dozen stewards—and thereby forcing a dozen managers into the official time tracking business. Bank time leaves managers the freedom to manage rather than to be glorified official time clerks. But the White House may have screwed that up with its anti-union executive orders putting a ridiculous cap on how much time union reps can have.
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“The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that doesn’t have national laws guaranteeing paid maternity leave. It is also the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee workers any vacation, paid or unpaid, and the only highly developed country (other than South Korea) that doesn’t guarantee paid sick days. In contrast, the European Union’s 28 nations guarantee workers at least four weeks’ paid vacation. Among the three dozen industrial countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has the lowest minimum wage as a percentage of the median wage — just 34 percent of the typical wage, compared with 62 percent in France and 54 percent in Britain.” The NY Times just published a fine piece on this issue from which we have taken the above excerpt. We recommend it strongly so readers can see what damage hating unions has done to the country.
Don’t expect to see President Trump’s top political operative leaving the White House any time soon with her head hung low, personal belongings in a box, and a pink slip dangling from her purse. The President has decided it is OK for his staff to violate laws that get in his way, even though he expects the Special Counsel to prosecute to the fullest any fed who dares to put a big toe over the Hatch Act line. Union reps should keep this case in mind when called on to defend a member’s error and talk about selective prosecution. Check out the Special Counsel’s press release about Ms. Conway.
You bet they are! We are not talking about a couple of million set aside for rainy days, but when unions sock away surplus wealth measured with eight digits to the left of the decimal point, then people take notice. In fact, a tiny LR think tank operation in a rather large federal agency has taken a passionate interest in these rarely talked about union surpluses. More specifically, it is kicking out ideas for how to use the money if union leaders do not take steps soon to channel the cash to internally improve their unions. Here is a little of what unions can expect to see soon, especially if Trump’s anti-employee executive orders are upheld by the courts. Continue reading
FLRA Member Jim Abbott wanders around town declaring that he is a “strict constructionist” or someone to applies the law as it is written without much, if any, consideration of tradition, common sense, legislative history, etc. Well, AFGE might be about to shove that phony-baloney legal philosophy down his throat. The union just filed a lawsuit claiming that the recent FSIP decision largely destroying the union’s ability to operate in the Social Security Administration is illegal because it does not apply the law as it is clearly written. Continue reading