A Head Start on Labor-Management Collaboration

Jessica Lambertson's story about how the National Treasury Employees Union and the National Credit Union Association have come together to start a labor-management partnership council ahead of the March 8 deadline for simply submitting their plans to do so, raised some interesting questions for me. Are efforts like this, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to restart a partnership council which happened even before President Obama's executive order mandating that agencies restart them, going to have to be adjusted to meet the National Council's standards and be certified? Is data being collected on the successes of these early efforts from the get-go? If not, that would seem like a wasted opportunity to collect as much performance data as possible from a effort that many admit was marred by a lack of data on how well it actually functioned the last time the Clinton administration set up these partnerships.