Federal labor lawyers dispute their own contract

The very federal employees charged with protecting workers against unfair labor practices are embroiled in a labor dispute of their own.

Attorneys at the National Labor Relations Board, an independent agency in Washington, are contemplating filing an unfair labor practice grievance on their own behalf over their agency's handling of benefits negotiated in the union's last contract, said Leslie Rossen, president of the NLRB Professional Association.

The association is angered by cutbacks in the number and location of detail assignments -- short-term positions at NLRB offices around the country -- as well cuts to performance awards offered to attorneys.

"Being labor lawyers, it hits you where you live," Rossen said. "It's like the shoemaker's children. Being a good labor lawyer doesn't mean you're going to have good labor relations. There's no correlation. It's just not good here; it's very unsophisticated, it's very adversarial."

Eric Adams, chief of the NLRB Labor Relations Section, said the contract disputes are simply budgetary. The agency wants to provide generous benefits, Adams said, but money is tight. This year's NLRB budget was frozen from the previous year and next year's will be as well, if President Bush's request is enacted. If anything, agency leaders' training as labor lawyers helps the situation, he said.

"I would say the NLRB is a special place compared to other government agencies," Adams said. "This agency historically has been very generous, very consultative with its employees to negotiate benefits. It's not that we don't want to do these things."

The agency's collective bargaining agreement with the professional association provides for up to 18 employees to go on training details at a regional office each year for 75 to 120 days, at a cost of about $10,000 per employee. This year, the agency granted all six employees who applied detail assignments, Adams said.

"It was definitely perceived as, at least from my unit members' perspective, as a great opportunity, a chance to get away, a chance to expand, a chance to make contacts in the field," Rossen said. "Along with the opportunity, if you were from another city [you had the chance] to get back to that city you were from and reconnect there, too. That was certainly a side benefit, which we think was frowned upon."

Rossen said the agency has removed many attractive coastal cities, including San Francisco and New York, from the detail options, limiting the choices to cities such as Detroit and Cleveland. Only a handful of employees applied for these details, Rossen said, because of the less geographically desirable options, and because the agency told employees at the beginning of the year that there was no budget for details.

"So here we are in this environment of pay for performance and what is this agency doing but getting rid of the details, which I should also add are offered to recruits as [an] attractive reason to come here," Rossen said. "It's sort of like a bait-and-switch."

Additionally, the NLRB suspended performance awards for fiscal 2006 because of budgetary constraints, according to the agency. In 2005 when the budget had more room, 39 percent of the professional association's bargaining unit members received a performance award for achieving an outstanding rating, officials pointed out.

Association members recently mounted a poster campaign within headquarters addressing their concerns and now, Rossen said, they are considering taking action with the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

"We've just decided that it's time to say that we're not going to take it anymore, enough is enough," Rossen said. "It has sort of been a slow burn, hoping that with reason they would change their minds. But we've pretty much gotten to the point where we don't think that that works."