Union officials representing employees at the General Services Administration have asked that the agency immediately begin formal bargaining over the fate of eight Federal Supply Service warehouses after informal labor-management negotiations were cut short last week.
But GSA officials have not agreed to a formal bargaining process, saying it's up to management to make the final decision on whether the warehouses will be closed.
In a letter sent last week to American Federation of Government Employees President Bobby L. Harnage, GSA Administrator David Barram asked that the informal bargaining process the two parties began in late October be completed as soon as possible. Barram gave AFGE a 48-hour deadline for completing its work on solutions to the warehouse problems.
AFGE and GSA reopened discussions on the GSA distribution system after an independent arbitrator ruled that Barram's July decision to shut down the eight warehouses violated an agreement with AFGE. A shutdown could have eliminated as many as 2,000 warehouse employees' jobs.
AFGE interpreted Barram's move as a unilateral cancellation of the bargaining process and asked to begin formal negotiations as soon as possible.
"You say you want a partnership and you want to approach the problem in a partnership way, but your letter and actions are not consistent with partnership behavior in the least way," Harnage wrote in a response to Barram's letter.
Ending informal bargaining also ignores the spirit of a recent presidential executive memo that asked federal managers to redouble their efforts to form labor-management partnerships, Harnage said.
But Barram defended his decision to end negotiations because, he said, the bargaining process was taking too long. "While these talks have been going on, our employees have been uncertain about their future employment status," he wrote. GSA needs to "make a reasonable decision in a reasonable amount of time."
AFGE spokesman Phil Kete said the informal negotiations were derailed in part by a broken promise on GSA's part to continue stocking the warehouses' inventories.
After rescinding its decision to shut down the warehouses, GSA agreed to return their inventory levels to their normal levels. "We understand that the stocking of the inventories has not returned to the prior levels as promised," Harnage wrote.
"AFGE is angry because this has dragged on as long as it has," Kete said. "We still have our people whose jobs are in jeopardy and whose lives are unsettled. We think we should have by now found some solution."