Unions and management organizations alike applauded the Office of Personnel Management’s effort to at least slow a future Republican administration’s efforts to strip federal employees of their civil service protections.
The Office of the Special Counsel highlighted its recent enforcement actions of Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act provisions to curb agency efforts to chill employee speech.
The Republican Study Committee’s fiscal 2025 budget plan would drastically cut federal workers’ retirement and health care benefits and end across-the-board annual pay hikes.
Federal agencies will be expected to embrace the return of collaborative councils, where federal employee unions may weigh in on future workplace policies, and measure the forums’ impact on employee engagement, agency performance and cost savings.
The American Federation of Government Employees’ new collective bargaining agreement streamlines grievance and arbitration rules and greatly expands work-life balance policies like shift trading.
The chairwoman of the body that oversees federal sector labor issues also expressed an openness to revisiting the legal definition of repudiating a union contract.
Less physical paper taken in by the board that settles bargaining-table disputes between unions and agencies will help streamline workloads as its parent agency reduces its office footprint due to budget woes.
Lawmakers and leaders of the American Federation of Government Employees warned that the former president represents a “threat to democracy” at the union’s annual legislative conference.
The new commissioner outlined a plan to create “core collaboration days” for members of management, while most frontline workers are seemingly spared from the cuts.
Despite two years of federal employees receiving the highest pay increases in decades, the Federal Adjustment of Income Rates Act’s sponsors say the federal workforce continues to suffer from “chronic underinvestment.”
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee favorably reported four nominees for adjudicative agencies recently hamstrung by vacancy-related case backlogs to the Senate floor for final consideration.
Labor leaders at Federal Correctional Institute Thomson said the Bureau of Prisons’ termination of a short-lived initiative to retain employees at the rural facility with a 25% boost to pay will cause hundreds to leave the agency.
Federal HR leaders said in a filing last week that a rule capping increased pay for federal workers noncompetitively selected to perform duties of a higher-graded position at 120 days penalizes employees for their agency’s mistake.
Officials at the federal government’s HR agency said a webpage housing sporadic reports on agencies’ official time use did not survive a recent website redesign, but suggested tweaks are ongoing.