John Gage on Labor-Management Partnership

I'm here at a press briefing at the American Federation of Government Employees headquarters and AFGE president John Gage just said some interesting things about how he views labor-management partnerships. I thought I'd reproduce them verbatim. Gage says:

I’ll probably get in trouble for this. But I don’t think the way the partnership was structured under president Clinton was really that clear. There was such a trust issue. A lot of people couldn’t buy if we’re partners, and we have to trust you, we really have to know what’s going on. I trust management. I trust them to be management. And I trust the union to be the union. Under Partnership, I was running a council, and we made great strides once we got by this philosophical dilemma. I would like a stripped down partnership. Yes, I want B-1 rights. All the rules on consensus, I don’t know if we need them. To go through all the rules that came up from the Clinton administration, and how many facilitators we made right, and how the philosophy of it got in the way of doing good, solid, labor-management business, I think was unnecessary. We didn’t have a lot of time on this. We had to write a partnership proposal very, very quickly. What we did was just scale down a lot of the bells and whistles that were in the old partnership agreements, kept the rights issue, and the encouragement that agencies would sit down. And I’m speaking for myself here really, I thought the process hurt good, solid communications. [On what they included in their proposal to the Obama administration:] Take the old partnership, and everywhere it says consensus, and training, and joint, cross it out. We have the lead on these things as the largest federal union. We talked to some of the smaller federal unions, and I think they were all gung-ho about getting partnership back. I think we could have had more time to talk to them about the actual results, they would have been enthusiastic [about a more stripped down version of partnership.]