Oct. 7—In a major win for federal workers, a U.S. judge for the second time denied the Bush administration’s efforts to destroy the civil service system covering 160,000 employees at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The Bush administration had asked U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer to narrow her Aug. 12 ruling blocking new personnel rules that would have virtually eliminated employees’ bargaining and workplace rights and ended civil service pay scales. On Oct. 7, Collyer rejected the administration’s request and accepted the unions’ argument that the rules essentially would eliminate the collective bargaining process.
After DHS issued the rules in January, AFGE and four other unions filed suit, arguing that significant parts of the proposed personnel system would violate the Homeland Security Act.
‘Let Us Improve the Personnel System Together’
In her original ruling, Collyer said the administration’s rules would result in federal unions bargaining “on quicksand,” because the department “would retain the right to change the underlying bases for the bargaining relationship and absolve itself of contract obligations while the unions would be bound.” Collyer, in the latest ruling, urged DHS officials to revisit the personnel system in a “renewed rule-making effort.”
A few days before the Oct. 7 ruling, AFGE President John Gage wrote DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff urging him to scrap the proposed rules and work with the unions to create a better system. “Shall we continue to debate the personnel system in the Congress through litigation or shall we jointly design a system that works? We ask you to throw out the regulations. Sit down with us and let us improve the DHS personnel system together,” Gage wrote.
Gage pointed out that 98 percent of the people, mostly DHS employees, who responded to the proposal during the federal comment period, opposed the regulations. “Nobody cares more about the mission of DHS than do these employees,” Gage said. “The front-line employees are now looking to you, wondering if you stand for their interests or against them,” he added.
Commenting on the implications of Collyer’s ruling on Defense Department employees, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers President Gregory Junemann says, “Once again, Judge Collyer has confirmed what we in the labor community have been correctly claiming for some time now…it is not a stretch to assume that a court would likely rule the NSPS contrary to law as well.”
IFPTE, AFGE and more than 30 other unions have formed the United Department of Defense Workers Coalition to oppose the new Pentagon personnel rules.
