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Government Leader home > news stories
04/17/06
Agency leaders struggle to manage around their unions
By Stephen Barr
Special to Government Leader
The departments of Homeland Security and Defense are locked in litigation with their unions. The Federal Aviation Administration and the air traffic controllers union have broken off contract talks and will take their dispute to Congress.
This spring in Washington, agency leaders are getting plenty of experience in trying to manage around their unions. It is, in some ways, a costly effort.
The departments of Defense and Homeland Security have slowed the roll out of their new personnel systems because of litigation, and will move only nonunionized workers into the new systems when they start. Officials acknowledge it may be a less efficient, and certainly less satisfactory, approach.
Then there are costs that are more easily counted. FAA spent an estimated $2.5 million on negotiations with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association before the talks collapsed, agency administrator Marion Blakey said on April 5. The expenses included salaries, airplane tickets, hotels and other costs of doing business over a nine-month period.
Harsh rhetoric between Bush administration officials and union presidents also takes its toll, in the sense that labor tensions create distractions and unease in the workforce. Union leaders claim that agencies are treating workers unfairly and accelerating retirements; agencies deny that turnover is on the rise and praise employees for their professionalism.
Still, the adversarial relationship between unions and the Bush administration means that the FAA dispute will end up in Congress, which will have 60 days to act on the agency’s proposal, and ongoing litigation has slowed efforts to launch pay-for-performance systems at Defense and Homeland Security.
Take the case of Homeland Security. The department has contended that it needs to be able to void union contracts and limit the topics that can be put on the bargaining table in order to respond more effectively to terrorist threats.
But that appears to be a hard sell in the courts. A district court judge blocked the new labor rules last August and, on April 6, appeals court judges questioned how the department’s approach could still ensure collective bargaining rights for employees.
Two of the appeals court judges challenged the administration’s contention that Homeland Security can unilaterally abrogate union contracts through its new personnel system.
Because it lost the first round in federal court, and because appeals could linger for months, Homeland Security was forced to revamp its game plan.
The department will roll out a new performance management and pay system to about 20,000 employees—all in management and in jobs not covered by union contracts.
Gregg Prillaman, the department’s chief human capital officer, said officials plan to have managers and supervisors shifted to the new performance-based pay system by January 2007. A year later, these employees will receive their first paychecks under the new performance program.
But the bulk of the department’s workforce, about 65,000 employees, will not move into a new performance management system until fiscal 2007. Many of these employees are union members, working in law enforcement agencies, such as Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Employees covered by union contracts will convert to the new compensation system in January 2008. They will become eligible for their first performance-based raise in January 2009.
The department has trained about 5,000 managers and supervisors for the implementation of the new performance management system. By the end of the year, Homeland Security plans to train another 8,000 managers and supervisors.
But other planning efforts are moving at a slower pace. Prillaman said that the department is still working on it design for “pay bands,” the broad salary scales that will replace the decades-old General Schedule, and on the “occupational clusters” linked to the pay bands. In addition, the department will have to decide whether to use a standard, governmentwide employment survey used to track wage growth in local labor markets or set up one specifically designed for Homeland Security.
“We are still talking about a lot of options,” Prillaman said. He added, “We have a pretty good sense of where we think the department should go, but we are still looking at options and we haven’t yet come to a final conclusion.”
Stephen Barr writes the Federal Diary column at the Washington Post and hosts a weekly discussion, Federal Diary Live, on washingtonpost.com.
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