Jan. 28—The Bush administration waited only days after the presidential inauguration before renewing its attacks on workers’ rights, with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unveiling plans this week to unilaterally change personnel rules for some 180,000 DHS employees, including 75,000 union members. The new rules would slash employees’ bargaining and other workplace rights and eliminate civil service pay scales.
Among other changes, the new rules eliminate the right to bargain over workforce staffing levels and weaken due process rights for workers who wish to appeal adverse actions by management. They also establish mandatory firing offenses.
The new rules encourage “a management of coercion and intimidation,” says John Gage, president of AFGE.
AFGE, along with the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), the National Federation of Federal Employees (a Machinists affiliate) and the National Association of Agriculture Employees, will file suit in federal court to block the rules that restrict bargaining and workers’ rights to due process in personnel, discipline and other matters.
“At a time when we need to focus our resources on protecting the nation’s security, this administration is taking away fundamental rights from the very people entrusted with guarding our borders,” says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.
New Rules Return Cronyism to Government
Charles Showalter, president of AFGE’s National Homeland Security Council, says the new regulations “reflect a mindset that from the beginning, viewed unions as enemies to be co-opted or destroyed instead of the allies we are in the war on terrorism.”
Along with limiting the workers’ collective bargaining rights, the new system all but eliminates the due process system that enables employees to speak with confidence when they see wrongdoing or mismanagement.
The new regulations for DHS personnel requires employees to take their concerns to an internal board appointed by the secretary of Homeland Security with no requirement for its members to be approved by Senate confirmation, as are the members of other federal labor relations boards.
"Without true due process, managers will have free rein to retaliate against employees who challenge management decisions,” says AFGE General Counsel Mark Roth.
“Instead of fulfilling the Homeland Security Act’s mandate for a flexible and contemporary 21st century human resources system,” says T.J. Bonner, president of AFGE’s National Border Patrol Council, “the new system allows for the sort of cronyism that nearly destroyed our nation’s civil service a century ago.”
Roth says the federal Office of Special Counsel (OSC) provides an example of how the new system will harm and intimidate workers. After the Bush administration eliminated civil service protections in the OSC in 2002, career employees who spoke out against management decisions suddenly found themselves transferred to offices thousands of miles away from their homes with no recourse to challenge the unilateral transfers.
Bush Sought to Slash Civil Service System When DHS Was Created
President George W. Bush led a fierce congressional battle to take away bargaining rights from DHS workers when legislation creating the agency was debated in 2002. In fact, he threatened to veto any Homeland Security bill that guaranteed workers’ rights. The final bill gave DHS management the authority to create new personnel rules.
“We, the unions, had earnestly sought to design a new, efficient personnel system in collaboration with DHS managers,” says Gage. But he says the unions’ concerns were ignored by the new rules that replace longstanding civil service regulations and pay scales.
“This is not a modern system. This is a step backward,” he says.
Although the Bush administration originally argued that new rules for Homeland Security were necessary because of the fight against terrorism, the White House now plans to use the DHS rules as a model for the entire federal workforce. The administration will ask Congress to pass new legislation to eliminate civil service rules at other agencies, officials from the federal Office of Personnel Management say.
Proposed new personnel rules for some 300,000 Defense Department civilian workers also are expected to be issued soon. A coalition of more than a dozen unions has lobbied Congress, mobilized workers for rallies and urged Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to respect workers’ rights in the new rules.
Like the DHS rules, the Defense Department’s new “National Security Personnel System” is expected to weaken or eliminate collective bargaining rights, worker rights to appeal management decisions, the current pay system and other changes.
After the proposed rules are issued, workers, unions and others will have 30 days to comment on the rules to the Federal Register and AFGE and the other unions are encouraging their members and local unions to file comments.
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