Officials debate the future of the civil service

Clinton administration and federal labor union officials debated the future of the federal workplace Monday as the Merit Systems Protection Board, the panel that hears federal employees' complaints about the way they are treated, celebrated its 20th anniversary.

Both union and administration officials praised the Civil Service Reform Act, which created many of the provisions that govern federal human resources management and established the MSPB, the Senior Executive Service, the Office of Personnel Management and the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

But there is much room for improvement, participants in the discussion said. Stronger labor-management partnerships, less confusing employee complaint procedures, better methods of dealing with poor performers and a more mobile Senior Executive Service are among the improvements officials said they would like to see. In addition, administration officials hoped for budget increases for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Office of Special Counsel-which also handles federal employees' complaints-and the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

"I give the Civil Service Reform Act a good solid B-," said Ronald Sanders, the chief human resources officer at the IRS and a former public administration professor at George Washington University. "All in all, it moved us forward. It was needed at the time and it did represent incremental change, albeit on a one-size-fits-all sort of model that may be obsolete."

Sanders said the "plethora of dispute resolution procedures" employees have at their disposal to challenge their managers' decisions are confusing. He also said labor-management partnerships have been slow to get off the ground. In addition, agencies haven't tried enough personnel demonstration projects to test new ways of managing employees and the government needs to encourage its senior executives to work in more than one agency, Sanders said.

Morley Winograd, director of Vice President Al Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government, said NPR is creating a task force to review the equal employment opportunity complaint process and recommend ways to improve it. Burgeoning federal EEO complaints have created a massive backlog of unresolved disputes.

National Treasury Employees Union President Bob Tobias criticized the Civil Service Reform Act for only allowing unions to negotiate on a few selected issues.

"When you have a narrow scope of bargaining, labor-management relations is not at the heart of the agency, it's at the margins," Tobias said. Despite the problems with the act, the Clinton administration's commitment to partnerships has improved union relations with agencies over the past five years, Tobias said. "Agency heads are asking themselves the question for the very first time: What can I get from this relationship, as opposed to how might we keep these folks on the outside."

American Federation of Government Employees President Bobby Harnage said that successes in partnerships should not overshadow the labor-management tension that continues throughout government. Even if a partnership agreement exists on paper, union leaders and agency managers must work hard at learning how to cooperate, Harnage said.

Harnage also said the idea that it is difficult to fire poor performers in the federal government is a myth.

"There's no such thing as one poor performer. That individual has a supervisor," Harnage said. "If he or she is staying on the rolls, then we have two poor performers."

Harnage said performance management rules, which were established by the Civil Service Reform Act, do not need to be changed. Instead, managers need to have the courage to deal with poor performance, he said.

Office of Personnel Management Director Janice Lachance urged federal personnel specialists to take advantage of flexibilities available under the current civil service system. A growing number of agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, have been granted exceptions from the current civil service system by Congress.

"There are a number of flexibilities available out there that just aren't being tapped," Lachance said. OPM has created a Web site describing the flexibilities.