March 27, 2006
CBP TO VOTE ON UNION REPRESENTATION
Source: FedNews Online
Customs and Border Protection employees will soon select which union will be the agency's sole representative.
The Federal Labor Relations Authority will mail ballots to approximately 21,000 eligible CBP employees May 9. Ballots must be returned by June 22, and the Authority will begin tallying votes June 27.
CBP employees will have three choices: the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Treasury Employees Union or no union. If no choice garners 50 percent of the votes, a runoff will feature the top two vote-getting options.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 bundled 22 agencies into the Department of Homeland Security. Two of the those agencies -- Customs Service, a part of the Department of Treasury, and Immigration and Naturalization Services, a Department of Justice agency -- merged to form CBP.
Both unions have a foothold in CBP -- AFGE represents mostly employees who entered the agency through DOJ and most NTEU members were one-time Treasury employees.
March 20, 2006
Social Security reform rejected
By Amy Fagan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Last week, during the Senate budget debate, Republicans raised the issue of Social Security reform, and Democrats -- surprised that the issue won't go away -- pledged to make it a major campaign issue this year.
"The issue that won't die," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer after the Senate narrowly defeated a Social Security amendment to the budget bill.
"It's going to be one of the big issues in 2006," pledged the New York Democrat, who is chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "They just gave us more fuel."
Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican, offered the proposal, which would have let Congress create a reserve fund protected under budget rules to save the Social Security surplus to pay for future benefits instead of other federal programs, as happens now.
"There is simply no way to save Social Security if we don't have the courage to stop using the surplus as a secret slush fund," Mr. DeMint said. "We will not be deterred by cynics who offer no solutions."
The Senate defeated the proposal 53-46, with eight Republicans voting no, but Democrats still called it a step towards creating the Social Security private accounts that President Bush wants.
Mr. Schumer pledged to tell voters that electing a Democratic Senate is the only way to "make sure Social Security isn't privatized."
"Any time there's an opportunity to privatize Social Security, they'll take it," said Sen. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat. He said the DeMint proposal was "evidence today that they're going to stick with it."
Mr. Bush's proposal to let individuals divert a part of the Social Security's payroll tax into personal retirement accounts was "soundly rejected by the American people," yet Republicans still pursue it, Mr. Baucus said.
But supporters of the proposal said Democrats just want the status quo, under which Social Security will crumble. Mr. DeMint said his proposal stated "absolutely nothing about personal accounts," but was "about whether you believe Social Security should be saved or allowed to wither on the vine."
"I'm saddened this amendment was characterized inaccurately as a privatization move," said Sen. Michael D. Crapo, Idaho Republican. "The American public and future generations of taxpayers will suffer if we cannot address the issues regarding Social Security and fiscal discipline."
Democrats aren't the only ones who see a campaign issue. "Those who voted against this amendment voted to raid Social Security," Mr. DeMint said. "Now, every senator will be on record whether they oppose or support the raid."
Including interest, Congress has raided $1.7 trillion from Social Security since 1985, according to Mr. DeMint's office. Mr. Bush's Social Security proposal never gained enough momentum in Congress, but administration officials, some Republicans and even Mr. Bush himself continue to raise the issue from time to time. In his State of the Union speech, Mr. Bush called for a commission to investigate options for saving the system, and just days later he mentioned his personal-accounts proposal in his long-term budget outline.
March 19, 2006
Wave of federal workers to retire
Some agencies streamline hiring as longtime staff prepare to leave
By Melissa Harris
The wave of federal workers originally hired to spy on the Soviet Union, launch the Great Society and regulate everyone from polluters to drugmakers in the 1960s and 1970s is beginning to age out of the work force, an exodus that some officials say could drain expertise and diminish the quality of service.
The numbers point to what some call a "retirement tsunami": 60 percent of federal workers are older than 45, and many could retire now if they wanted to, compared with 31 percent in the private sector, according to one think tank.
Experts say that the next five years could see a mass exit of experienced - and loyal - employees at a time when some younger workers see public service as a steppingstone to lucrative private-sector jobs.
"The loss of so many individuals with a deep, ingrained institutional knowledge of their agency has the potential to cause a lapse or pause of service delivery," Linda Springer, director of the Office of Personnel Management, said at a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington.
Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit human resources think tank, said he sees signs of that in such things as the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina and the lagging translation of foreign intelligence at the FBI.
"It's a problem of rust, rather than engine failure," said Stier, whose group, which helps the federal government improve its hiring practices, provided numbers on the coming federal retirement wave.
"It creeps up slowly but nonetheless can have devastating consequences. ... The work will not get done at the same level unless older workers stay longer or they are replaced with equal or superior folks."
Don Freeburn is one of those whose skills and experience hang in the balance. Hired by NASA in 1965, he worked on the Apollo program and is a general engineer with the Department of Energy.
He could have retired eight years ago, but college bills kept him in the work force.
"First of all, the job is great," said Freeburn, 63, of Clarksburg. "Second, this is a high cost-of-living area, and, basically, I had two kids in college, a wife who went back to college, and those debts over the last 10 years. Next year, I'll take another look at the finances."
His situation mirrors that of many older workers who rode into public service on the idealism of the 1960s.
Heeding the call
Early in that decade, people in their 20s heeded President John F. Kennedy's call to do something for their country, and the federal government hired them in record numbers.
Excluding the Postal Service, it added more than 428,000 employees during the 1960s, a growth of about 23 percent.
The Social Security Administration, with headquarters in Woodlawn, was a prime illustration. By the mid-1970s, young employees had swelled its work force to almost 82,500 workers nationally, nearly seven times its size in 1950. Many of them were hired en masse to handle an expansion of disability benefits.
The tide turned in the 1980s and 1990s. During the Reagan era, executive branch employment outside of the Defense Department and the Postal Service shrank 11 percent, to 1.16 million, according to Office of Personnel Management data, as employees rode out on anti-big-government rhetoric.
Budgets were stripped. Agencies laid off workers under official "reductions in force." Then President Bill Clinton shrank the military.
Privatization further scaled back the ranks, as did early-retirement packages aimed at meeting year-to-year cuts. Some recruiters no longer had a reason to give speeches at colleges or attend a large number of job fairs because they were hiring few people. Little attention was given to whether enough talent remained to replace retiring senior managers.
As a result, both of the Baltimore area's largest agencies - Social Security and the National Security Agency - have been playing catch-up.
"We hired no more than a handful of people, 200 to 250 per year, through the '90s," said John Taflan, director of human resources at the NSA, which eavesdrops on calls and e-mail globally. "We had to ramp up to rebuild a recruiting network. ... It took us about three years to get it going again."
Given the new demands after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the agency plans to hire 1,500 people worldwide yearly from 2003 to 2011, and Taflan said the nature of that work dictates that about 60 percent of those hired are recent college graduates.
But training those workers - 97 percent of whom stay until retirement - is slow.
"It takes three to five years and, for more difficult languages, seven years, to train someone to see behind the actual spoken word and draw conclusions from it," Taflan said. "It's hard to hire someone midway through their career because of the long training time. They're over halfway through their career and just learning how to do the work."
Social Security hired almost 16,000 workers from fiscal 2002 to fiscal 2005 to gear up for coming retirements. The agency is in fairly good shape in terms of staffing, officials say.
"SSA hasn't been losing permanent positions in great numbers," said Terry Stradtman, a regional director who oversees 450 workers in several Mid-Atlantic states, including Maryland. "Some other agencies have been forced to downsize more drastically."
Hurdles to hiring
In filling crucial vacancies in a tight labor market, government agencies face a number of challenges.
Workers with more than 30 years of service can retire as early as age 55 and not lose benefits. Federal workers have pensions, a well-managed 401(k)-style plan and access to health care for life, but their pay generally is lower than in the private sector. Statistics show that government agencies end up hiring a far smaller percentage of their interns than do their private-sector counterparts.
And the government hiring process can be the definition of red tape, with job postings written in impenetrable jargon and applicants asked to answer detailed questionnaires as well as submit college transcripts.
Previously, the Woodlawn-based Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services took 90 days on average to hire someone, and its personnel department had to go through 64 steps to do so. Many applicants never heard back from the agency.
Federal executives had to be persuaded that recruitment, hiring and retention were top priorities, said Dan Blair, deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management.
"We had to convince people at the top level that this is not a human resources thing that can be relegated to the back room," Blair said.
The Medicare agency has made over its hiring process, drastically reducing the number of steps and smoothing out the language in its job postings.
Social Security has won awards in planning for the retirement wave and for its rapid hiring speed of 26 days from application deadline to a job offer during fiscal year 2005.
The National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have started sharing job applications.
The NSA also runs a program that gives college students free tuition, room and board in exchange for a commitment to work for the government after graduation.
On the whole, the federal government is trying to move faster and to sweeten the pot with sign-on bonuses, work-from-home opportunities and tuition reimbursement.
"We feel we have as fine of a recruitment marketing program as anyone else in terms of our posters, brochures and CD-ROMs," said Fred Glueckstein, who directs Social Security's recruitment planning efforts. "We have materials in almost 100 languages. We've put a lot of thought in how to do this right."
Retention
Agencies are also beginning to look at ways to retain graying workers past their retirement age, something that might dovetail with the desires of baby boomers.
A Merrill Lynch survey last year found that 76 percent of people born after World War II and before 1964 plan to work during retirement. Ideally, the respondents said, they would like to move between periods of work and leisure.
Almost all of them - 94 percent - said they don't plan to work full time.
Federal rules don't always support flexibility. But Springer said the retirement wave means that federal agencies no longer have the "luxury" of turning away workers with decades of institutional knowledge just because they don't want to work 9-to-5 every day.
The aging of the federal work force has effects beyond the on-the-job hours.
In the 1970s, Social Security headquarters had more than 100 softball teams for its energetic young workers. Six teams remain.
"I occasionally have to serve the players icepacks with their beers," joked Carol Wiland, a bartender at Monaghan's Pub in Gwynn Oak, which has served as the teams' de facto clubhouse for decades.
March 15, 2006
AFGE JOINS SENIORS, DISABLED AMERICANS AND CONCERNED CITIZENS TO PROTEST MEDICARE PART D PROGRAM
Union Says Program is a Disaster and Enriches Businesses at Consumer’s Expense
(WASHINGTON)—The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) today joined hundreds of concerned citizens and numerous advocacy groups at a rally to protest against the Bush administration’s Medicare Part D plan during the president’s latest attempt to lift support for the ill-conceived program in Silver Spring, Md. AFGE vehemently opposes Medicare Part D because of its extraordinary complexity and aspects that will increase prescription drug prices for seniors, the disabled and others.
Medicare Part D lets private companies design and sell insurance plans offering prescription drug coverage. Consequently, the program forces individuals into managed care plans and out of the traditional and simpler Medicare plans they prefer.
“Medicare Part D is just a backdoor attempt to privatize the entire Medicare program,” said AFGE National Vice President Joe Flynn during today’s rally. “The administration tried this with Social Security and it failed. AFGE is confident that these latest attempts to gut Medicare will meet the same fate.”
Since its rollout 10 weeks ago, Medicare Part D implementation has been a disaster. The new law prevents Medicare from negotiating the lowest possible drug prices for beneficiaries and prevents them from choosing a simple drug benefit directly from Medicare. Consequently, beneficiaries are confused and distrustful about whether they should enroll and how they should choose from dozens of private insurance plans.
Additionally, missed enrollment targets, staff shortages at the federal agencies responsible for implementing the Part D program and mismanagement by the Bush administration will keep many individuals from being enrolled by the May 15, 2006 deadline. Those that don’t enroll by the deadline will see their premiums increase significantly. In some cases, the poorest beneficiaries, Medicare-Medicaid “dual eligibles,” will lose access to some drugs altogether.
“The administration misled the public about the true costs of this ridiculous program and who it really benefits,” said Flynn. AFGE projects that Medicare Part D will cost taxpayers nearly $700 billion over 10 years and $100 billion thereafter. Taxpayer subsidies to the real winners, the insurance companies, will total $46 billion over 10 years and help the companies increase profits by $139 billion.
To remedy the problem, AFGE, along with the AFL-CIO, Americans United, the Alliance for Retired Americans, the Campaign for America’s Future and Progressive Maryland, are urging elected officials to co-sponsor and support H.R. 3861 and S.1841, measures in the House and Senate respectively that would allow beneficiaries to escape paying increased premiums if they enroll by the end of 2006, change plans before the open enrollment period or dis-enroll from Medicare Part D and re-enroll in a better, prior plan.
MARCH 14, 2006
AFGE LEADERSHIP CITES STAFF SHORTAGES, UNDER-FUNDING AT NATION’S PORTS
AFGE National President John Gage recently returned from San Diego, where he toured a number of U.S. ports including San Ysidro, the country's largest port. With Gage were AFGE National Vice President Eugene Hudson; Local 2805 President Ed Bell, Vice President Henry Rodriguez, and Treasurer Joe Giron; and representatives from the AFL-CIO.
Among their findings were the disturbing facts that the nation's ports are short-staffed and under-funded, which in turn results in workplace stress, discomfort and animosity. The union reps did however find that the Customs and Border Protection officers showed significant interest in departmental unity. As the nation's homeland security union, AFGE strongly advocates all of the homeland security employees belonging to the same union.
President Gage and other AFGE DHS leaders recently have been engaged in a nationwide campaign to promote AFGE's position on the U.S. ports issue, specifically its concerns with understaffing, denial of overtime, and ships left un-inspected and unattended.
The American media turned to AFGE as an authority on the ports issue. Some of the media coverage included:
For more information on AFGE’s campaign to ensure DHS workers’ rights, call 1-800-701-9792.
March 14, 2006
Labor relations ruling threatens Pentagon's personnel reforms
By Karen Rutzick
Defense Department officials are moving ahead with a planned human resources overhaul by placing 11,000 nonbargaining-unit employees into a new pay structure in late April. But a legal snafu over the labor relations portion of reforms could complicate matters as the department tries to extend the human resources changes to employees represented by unions.
Shortly after a late February ruling by Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that enjoined the Pentagon's new system of negotiating with labor unions, Defense officials reaffirmed their intention to move the first wave of employees into the National Security Personnel System, with a Web posting.
Sullivan ruled that NSPS failed to provide adequate collective bargaining rights for Defense employees, in part because officials retained the right to override negotiated agreements in the name of national security. He also said the Pentagon's plan to replace the governmentwide Federal Labor Relations Authority, which decides labor-management disputes, with an internal board whose members are appointed by the Defense secretary, did not meet a requirement for third-party review.
Sullivan's ruling did not touch the human resources side of the NSPS. But the scaled-down first phase, dubbed "Spiral 1.1" - - originally designed to include 65,000 employees - - now only includes a smaller group of nonunion workers. The reason is the department does not need to negotiate a new contract with such employees regarding the changed practices.
Without a new labor relations system, the Pentagon would have to separately negotiate the human resources changes with every local bargaining unit -- there are more than 1,000 nationwide -- and wait for contracts to expire, which could take years, said the former general counsel of the FLRA, Joseph Swerdzewski, who is helping the unions prepare for the possibility of such negotiations.
The new labor relations system the department is seeking would render all existing collective bargaining agreements unenforceable.
The revamp is thereby intimately linked to the rest of the planned changes including the crown jewel of the overhaul -- replacing the decades-old General Schedule pay system with one that measures employee performance and local markets to determine compensation.
"Potentially the issue is going to be whether or not they want to do piecemeal implementation or implement it all," Swerdzewski said. "You can only bargain...when the collective bargaining agreement's term has ended. For many of the activities, many of the DoD locations, I'm sure they still have existing contracts."
NSPS spokeswoman Joyce Frank said the Pentagon is "currently in the process of assessing options for implementation of NSPS beyond Spiral 1.1." The department also is deciding whether to appeal Sullivan's decision.
Congress also gave the department authority to conduct national-level bargaining in lieu of bargaining with so many local units of one union, but the Pentagon has not made plans to do so.
The possibility of national-level bargaining further complicates the process of implementing NSPS without the proposed labor reforms, according to American Federation of Government Employees attorney Sarah Starrett.
National-level bargaining is not an easy fix to the problem, Starrett said, because some Defense Department work areas, for example, are represented by multiple unions that band together to negotiate one contract.
"It's going to be a transitional period," Starrett said. "Stay tuned because this is really going to be a work in progress. No one has ever done this before."
Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England told federal employees at a conference in Baltimore that prospects for an appeal were high. Sullivan also gave the government an option to submit a reworked labor relations plan to him for consideration.
March 13, 2006
DOD UPDATES PAY BANDS
Source: fednews-online.com
The Department of Defense has released an updated version of the National Security Personnel System's pay scale.
NSPS spokesperson Joyce Frank said the pay scale was updated to reflect FY 06 appropriations and the status of a current lawsuit challenging the System. (See DOD FORGING AHEAD WITH NSPS at http://www.fednews-online.com/view_publication.aspx?publicationId=8943.)
DoD intends to implement NSPS Spiral 1.1 April 30, a date the Department set earlier this year. In the initial Spiral, 11,000 DoD employees will be brought into the system. The majority of those employees work at the Naval Sea Systems Command headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Spiral 1.2 is scheduled to be implemented in October, and Spiral 1.3 is slated to begin January 2007.
NSPS is a performance-based human capital system that will eventually incorporate almost 700,000 DoD civilian employees' pay and classification, performance management, hiring, workforce shaping, disciplinary matters, appeals procedures and labor-management relations.
Under the current NSPS structure, non-supervisory employees will be grouped into one of 11 job types, which are subsequently divided into four pay bands. Supervisors would be placed into one of four job types, and then placed into one of three pay bands.
The amount of money in each pay band can be found in training slides at http://www.cpms.osd.mil/nsps/TownHall030906.pdf.
More information about NSPS can be found at http://www.cpms.osd.mil/nsps/index.html.
March 8, 2006
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
March 7, 2006
Government Smart-Card Project Hits Snags on Fingerprints, Costs
Source: Washington Post
By Stephen Barr
The government's smart-card project appears at risk of falling behind schedule.
Federal agencies are supposed to begin issuing government-wide identification cards that can vouch for the identity of federal employees and most contractors in October, but the Government Accountability Office warns that setting up and testing new ID systems may not be completed within deadlines set by the Bush administration.
The GAO reviewed the progress of six agencies in developing smart-card systems and found differences in implementation plans, which could hamper efforts to create a government-wide ID card accepted by all agencies. The congressional watchdog agency also found a lack of reliable information about the costs of buying cards and equipment and modifying software systems.
"We acknowledge much more work must be done in order to be successful," the Office of Management and Budget said in a letter accompanying the GAO report. The letter was signed by Karen S. Evans , who is in charge of technology policy at the Office of Management and Budget.
President Bush launched the smart-card project in August 2004, calling for more secure and reliable forms of identification for government workers as part of a broader effort to keep terrorists, criminals and other unauthorized people from getting into federal buildings or hacking into computer systems.
Federal employees are issued a variety of ID cards, and many can be easily forged or altered to gain access to federal buildings. Some agencies, such as the departments of Defense and State, have developed versions of smart cards for many of their employees.
Smart cards, which resemble plastic credit cards, are embedded with a computer chip that permits an exchange of data with another system. The card can store biometric information, such as fingerprints, and can track where a person goes, based on clearances through security checkpoints. In addition to building access, smart cards can be used to supplement passwords for logging onto computers, with users inserting the card into readers on their desktops.
Under the federal project, cards must display the name of the government employee or contractor, a photograph, the name of their agency or affiliation, a serial number, and an expiration date.
There is no estimate of how many smart cards will be handed out across government (although the Defense Department has said it plans to issue 3.6 million cards to the military, civil service, contractor and other employee groups).
The administration's timetable requires agencies to start issuing cards Oct. 27 and to verify or complete background investigations on employees and contractors in 2007 and 2008.
But the project has hit some snags. The original guidelines called for the cards to carry electronic representations of two fingerprints, but the GAO said agency officials have objected because reading two fingerprint images will require a large amount of computer memory.
The GAO report said it could take 30 seconds to read the fingerprints, "a length of time that would likely cause unacceptable delays in admitting individuals to federal buildings."
Some agency officials prefer to store only details of the ridges in a fingertip, which would cut the transmission time between the cards and card readers to less than 10 seconds. But GAO said that the partial images are of "questionable reliability" and that vendors use techniques that are "proprietary and incompatible." Efforts are underway to resolve the matter, GAO said.
The cost of converting ID systems, however, may be one of the largest problems facing the government. The GAO said some agencies may find it difficult to cover conversion costs out of existing budgets.
"Agencies have been faced with having to potentially make substantial new investments in smart card technology systems with little time to adequately plan and budget for such investments and little cost information about products they will need to acquire," the GAO said.
Stephen Barr's e-mail address isbarrs@washpost.com.
2006 The Washington Post Company
