President George W. Bush is insisting that 170,000 employees of the proposed Homeland Security Department have no collective bargaining or civil service rights in debate over legislation under consideration by the U.S. Senate, the White House stressed Sept. 3.
Bush and his backers claim they need to strip the workers of their rights to create management “flexibility” for the new department. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) called Bush’s proposal “a power grab of unprecedented magnitude.”
Under both the Bush administration proposal and the Senate version (S. 2452) of homeland security legislation, several existing government departments and agencies and their 170,000 workers would be merged into one massive department. About 50,000 of the workers are current union members, while the rest are protected by civil service laws. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), author of the Senate bill, estimates there is agreement on about 90 percent of the homeland security blueprint.
In a “Dear Colleague” letter to other senators, Lieberman said he was “disappointed by the administration’s inordinate focus on this bright red herring, which threatens to distract us from our shared goal of creating a unified and accountable Department of Homeland Security….It would be a tragedy to for us to scorch the substantial amount of common ground on which all our proposals have been built.”
But the Bush White House rallied Republican senators to mount an attack against the workers’ rights sections of the bill by offering amendments to strip those provisions from the legislation and bring the bill in line with a House version passed in July that also denies workers their current rights.
“We are not going to roll over when it comes to the principles and beliefs we hold to be very, very important,” Daschle said.
As debate got under way Sept. 4, Denise Dukes, an AFGE member in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters in Washington, D.C., told a press conference, “Union members are not an obstacle to homeland security. We are homeland security.”
Dukes, a management analyst, was part of the 800-member headquarters team that went into emergency mode within an hour of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Many were sent immediately to New York City to coordinate the emergency response. Others worked to coordinate efforts by the Red Cross, police, firefighters and emergency medical teams.
“FEMA employees responded and deployed without question as soon as they were told to do so. Flexibility is our middle name,” Dukes said.
AFGE President Bobby L. Harnage said, “Union membership has never been inconsistent with national security. The right of federal employees to engage in collective bargaining has never undermined homeland security. Federal employees, their families and their unions are adamantly opposed to any effort to use the tragic events of Sept. 11 to advance stalled but longstanding efforts to bust federal unions.
In addition to the attack on workers' rights, Senate Republicans are expected to try to strip from the bill its Davis-Bacon prevailing wage provisions for workers involved in emergency preparedness construction projects that are part of homeland security. Opponents erroneously claim S. 2452 expands Davis-Bacon beyond its current application to include disaster relief construction activity. Davis Bacon has covered federally assisted construction of emergency preparedness projects since 1950, when Congress enacted the Civil Defense Act, and it was reaffirmed by Congress in 1994, when FEMA was given responsibility for emergency preparedness.
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