Panel: Unions should get more bargaining rights

Expanded bargaining rights for federal employee unions should be enacted into law, a panel on the future of federal labor relations said Tuesday.

The panel, which appeared at a Federal Labor Relations Authority training conference, included Janice Lachance, director of the Office of Personnel Management; Bobby Harnage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees; and Marty Malin, director of the Institute for Law and the Workplace at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

The panel members said issues related to pay and other substantive matters should be on the bargaining table. Currently, managers do not have to consult unions on so-called permissive issues, which include the pay grades of employees and the number of employees in federal offices. Permissive issues are also called (b)(1) issues because they are listed in Section 7106(b)(1) of federal labor relations law as matters that unions have no statutory right to negotiate.

The law should be changed to give unions a say in those matters, Harnage, Malin and Lachance agreed. OPM's Lachance is a former AFGE official.

The (b)(1) issue has raised the ire of employee unions, who complain that the pro-labor Clinton administration is not doing enough to make agencies bargain over more issues.

In 1993, President Clinton issued an executive order instructing agencies to bargain over (b)(1) issues. Many agencies have ignored the order. A case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will decide whether the Federal Labor Relations Authority can require agencies to follow the executive order.

The administration has floated a draft memorandum that would put political pressure on agencies to bargain over (b)(1) issues, but that effort has stalled amid management opposition. Some managers worry that more bargaining rights would mire agencies in endless labor-management negotiations.

"Our biggest issue is getting over the psychological barrier of collective bargaining over pay and benefits," Harnage said.

Lachance said the scope of bargaining is not an issue in federal offices where the concept of "labor-management partnership" has taken hold. In those offices, managers consult with unions before major decisions are made in any area affecting the workplace.

"True partnership is talking about important issues before decisions are made," Lachance said. "Walling off [(b)(1)] issues is an artificial barrier."

Malin noted that until 1978, federal labor relations were guided by executive orders, issued by Presidents Kennedy and Nixon. In 1978, President Carter signed union rights into law. President Clinton expanded those rights by executive order in 1993, and now there's a push to make the added rights statutory.