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Government Leader home > news stories
06/13/06
Federal management coalition addresses common issues
By John L. Guerra
Special to Government Leader
The Government Managers Coalition, a loosely organized consortium of federal management executive organizations, has a plan of attack for solving the unique but complicated issues faced by more than 200,000 managers in the federal government.
“We’ve all got employees that work under two different retirement systems; we need to fix the rules governing management training and we need clarity on the treatment of managers when employees file complaints,” said William Bransford, general counsel to the Senior Executives Association and spokesman for GMC. “As a group, we’ve talked to members of Congress to determine the timing of legislative solutions, and we’re more than willing to testify at hearings on the issues all federal managers face.”
GMC was formed in early April, when five associations of federal managers joined together in a loose coalition that meets once a month to align each group’s efforts to “seek changes that will make the government a better workplace and America a better place to live,” Bransford says.
Federal employees are probably familiar with the five groups under the GMC umbrella: SEA, the Federal Managers Association, Professional Managers Association, Federal Aviation Administration Managers Association and National Council of Social Security Management Association. Combined, they include a couple of hundred thousand supervisors, managers and executives.
Each group has its own issues it wants to fix, but overlapping problems will become the concern of GMC at its monthly meetings, which more often than not are conference calls, because many managers work outside Washington. The FAA’s managers’ group, for instance, will continue to seek reform on aviation issues that affect its members, and SEA will continue to try pin down pay scale confusion.
“The groups will still lobby individually for their causes,” Branford said. “But when GMC does take a position, we’ll push the issues on a united front. The executive group that originates the issue to be fixed will head that drive, but with the united backing of the rest of the groups under GMC.”
The retirement system question has been dogging agency managers for a long time, Bransford said. The original Civil Service Retirement System began in 1920; after 1984, new federal employees were put under the Federal Employee Retirement System. Older employees under CSRS can shift career unused sick leave toward retirement, which translates into larger monthly checks after they retire. The newer system, FERS, doesn’t let employees combine unused sick leave with retirement portfolios, which means older employees take blocks of time off in a “use it or lose it” plan.
The result? Loss of productivity and loss of taxpayer money, Bransford said. “It’s becoming an unmanageable problem,” he said. “There’s a much higher proportion of sick leave being taken by FERS employees than CVRS employees.”
GMC, because the disparate retirement plans affect all managers, will use its united front to find an answer through Congress. GMC doesn’t stand behind a specific proposal but offers at least two ideas for fixing the sick-leave problem. One would be to offer employees a cash payment of 40 cents on the dollar for unused sick leave or let employees put a dollar equivalent of sick leave toward a health insurance program. “As a group, we’ve talked to Rep. Jim Moran [ D-Va.] and other lawmakers to see if we can come up with a legislative solution,” Bransford said.
“There may not be time this legislative session, but we’ll see about next session,” he added.
Nearly all federal executives and managers say there’s a dearth of training for new managers in the federal government. Because it’s a universal problem, GMC wants new managers to receive training within a year of winning their jobs. “People should be given proper training when they become a manager,” Bransford said.
Managers are caught in the middle of the federal hierarchy and can more easily defend their turf by joining GMC and other executive membership groups.
“On one side, you’ve got the employee unions; on the other side you’ve got the political leadership that sets government policy,” Bransford said. “The career federal manager is caught right in the middle, often without legal protection.”
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