CREATIVE SOLUTION FOR HIGHER GRADED DUTY GRIEVANCE
It is one thing to have a great contract provision backing you up. In this case, the AFGE-DVA contract covering Pharmacy Technicians in Richmond, VA required temporary promotions for those who performed higher graded duties for 25 percent of the time for 10 or more days. That may be the best higher graded duty protection in any federal sector contract. But, you also need a savvy union to steer around the obstacles to enforcing contract rights through arbitration, and AFGE’s foresight did the trick in a very creative way when the employee asked for six years of back pay for the time he had been required to do the job of a person one grade higher than him. Continue reading
MSPB TWEAKS ADVERSE ACTION DUE PROCESS CONCEPT
The agency indefinitely suspended an employee for losing his security clearance, and on appeal MSPB used the case to tweak it concept of due process protections in an adverse action. That makes it a case lots of LR/ER practitioners should know about. Continue reading
WHAT IS ASSOCIATIONAL RACE DISCRIMINATION?
Is it illegal to discriminate against a person based on the race or nationality of their spouse or significant other? The attorneys at Fox Rothschild posted a short piece on what the courts have said and the newest case. We recommend you at least zip through it to make sure you are aware of the employee rights and agency liabilities associated with this concept. See “Associational Race Discrimination 101.” If the entire post does not open on your screen, copy everything visible and paste it into a Word page. It should pop up. Or print it.
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR ATTORNEY FEE PETITIONS
Yes, we admit that this is a pet peeve for us. If even a few attorneys submit outlandish fee requests to EEOC, MSPB or arbitrators that will hand those already looking to screw over federal employees great facts to whip up a drive to reduce employee rights—and especially the right to attorney fees. (Even if that group only limited fee reimbursements for union attorneys to the union’s actual hourly cost for their labor it would have a significant effect.) So, we are going to put a spotlight on what we believe to be the kind of facts that are feeding the anti-fed posse. Continue reading
REMEMBER THIS AFGE AWOL DECISION
One of the reasons we activated Fedsmill was to overcome the disadvantage regional and local union leaders are at when they have no way to hear about case victories from other unions. That hobbles them and it can be terminal for the employee whose career hangs in the balance. For example, when an employee in a Florida VA cemetery was AWOL 21 times over a 100-day period the agency suspended him for 14 days. (The employee also had a zero balance of annual, sick, and FMLA leave during those 100 days.) When the case got to arbitration, … Continue reading
NFFE STEPS UP ITS CONCERN FOR OPEN UNION GOVERNANCE
You have to admire a national union leadership that not only supports increased openness in how the organization is run, but also is confident enough to open the debate to all members. NFFE has done precisely that with its web page listing the governance issues it is currently wrestling with in the first few months of its new president’s term. If you are a union leader at any level, this should be on interest. So, check it out. We once had a chance to boost the chances of a union leader with an unprecedented commitment to openness and it may have been one of the most lasting good things we did for that union.
FEDSMILL IS LOOKING FOR RESTRUCTURING IDEAS
Leadership of all the federal agencies that so deeply impact federal employee lives is about the change radically, bringing with it new challenges for some and opportunities for others. We want to get ready to respond to both, but to do that we probably have to reduce our role in operating Fedsmill.com. Just how we do that is something we are starting to explore. One option is transfer control to some national union or other employee advocate such as a law firm or retired fed LR/ER/HR/EEO expert. Do we partner with a university LR program? Do we just assist someone else to get their own site going from scratch and retire the Fedsmill operation? While we have begun contacting some law firms and a handful of retired, but still very involved, federal LR/ER/HR folks, we would like your ideas too. If you have some, just send us an e-mail via the comment section after every story. It will be just between us.
HARVARD OFFERS INSIGHT ON WHY SOME MANAGERS ARE DOMINATORS
The on-line Harvard Business Review just posted a piece entitled, “Good Bosses Switch Between Two Leadership Styles.” The two styles are managing by dominating subordinates versus inspiring through the prestige of being an expert in whatever occupational filed one is in. The author makes the point that both styles can be appropriate depending on the situation. While we agree that there are situations that call for a manager to hoard all information, intimidate, coerce, threaten, and/or laud his/her power over employees, the piece strongly suggests that one reason a boss might always use a dominating style is that s/he doesn’t have the skill, talent, smarts, etc. to use any of the other styles. In fact, we wonder if this is particularly true of leaders at the top of complex, multi-departmental organizations who may have been expert in one departmental task area, but have little to nothing to offer in other departmental areas. Dominating staff, even to the point of “disappearing’ some as a warning to others, seems an especially sound hypothesis in organizations with weak oversight from executive boards, or no oversight as in privately owned entities. We ended the HBR piece thinking that maybe OPM should add a question to the annual survey to ask employees to rank their supervisor’s tendency to manage via domination techniques rather than inspiring and energizing staff. With very rare exception, nearly everyone agrees long term dominators hobble, if not destroy, organizations.