No Confidence in Rumsfeld

Source: AFL-CIO
After a federal judge ruled that the federal Defense Department’s so-called National Security Personnel System (NSPS) doesn’t come close to ensuring bargaining rights for the department’s more than 700,000 workers, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is appealing the decision.
 
Imposed on U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees and proposed for Defense Department employees in January 2005, the new personnel rules would scrap decades of federal civil service laws. The rules would replace civil service pay grades and promotion rules with so-called performance-based job evaluations that would limit the issues that can be discussed in contract bargaining by taking pay and work rules off the table.  
 
Enough is enough. It’s time to get rid of Rumsfeld, say union leaders, including AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and AFGE President John Gage. They joined with the United Department of Defense Workers Coalition, a group of three-dozen labor organizations, March 7 to call for a vote of no confidence in Rumsfeld.

Gage says Rumsfeld has lost the confidence of his employees: 

In misleading Congress and his employees, pushing an agenda that attacks fairness in the workplace, takes away the employees’ voice over important workplace conditions and puts forth a pay system that will undermine the future standard of living for most Defense Department employees, Secretary Rumsfeld has broken the bonds of trust with the employees.
“At a time when national security is such a vital concern for Americans, it’s unconscionable that the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld is targeting the very workers tasked with keeping our nation safe, and is stripping them of their fundamental right to have a voice on the job,” Sweeney says.
 
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled Feb. 27 that the NSPS fails to “ensure even minimal collective bargaining rights” for the department’s more than 700,000 workers. He blocked the department from imposing the new rules.

Last August, in a decision on similar Bush-proposed workplace rules for the 160,000 workers in Homeland Security, U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said, “The regulations fail in their obligation to ensure collective bargaining rights to DHS employees.”

Federal workers and their unions have been making the same argument since the Bush White House announced its plans in 2004 to make sweeping changes in federal personnel practices.

In both court cases, the coalition of unions had filed lawsuits to block the proposed personnel rules. Homeland Security did appeal Collyer’s decision and arguments are set for April 6 before a three-judge appeals court panel.
 
by James Parks