GAO Workers to Vote on Union

(Press Associates, Inc.)

By Mark Gruenberg, WASHINGTON (PAI) Upset by a pay-for-performance system their agency imposed just over a year ago, top federal analysts and investigators at the non-partisan Government Accountability Office filed May 8 for a recognition election there, voting on whether the Professional and Technical Engineers would represent the 1,500 workers. The vote is expected within 45-90 days, but no date has been set by an in-house board that oversees GAO labor relations. The 75,000-member union filed cards from more than half of the workers. This would be the first-ever election at the 86-year-old agency.

IFPTE Secretary-Treasurer Paul Shearson said the keys for the union’s drive were changes in both GAO’s structure and its pay scales, imposed after the agency hired an outside management consultant, Watson Wyatt Worldwide, to study both. The results, he told PAI, were that 300 workers had their pay capped and lost cost-of-living hikes--and the workers had no input in the revamp.

"The Comptroller General," David Walker, head of the agency "was making these changes and he said it wouldn’t have any negative impact" on the workers, Shearson explained. "And as highly educated professionals," who audit and investigate all government programs and much more, "they’re used to being asked for their input. But he made no effort to try to involve them."

Walker based the restructuring of the agency on the consultant’s analysis, which he did not share with the workers, Shearson said. "They were told the analysis was a ‘market comparison,’ but he would not say what the market was," he commented.

"Analysts at the agency devote their careers to speaking out about improving government, yet at their own agency their voices have been muted," said IFPTE President Greg Junemann in announcing the recognition vote filing. "In recent months problems with a reclassification system hurt the team mentality that made the agency successful. Morale has suffered and management unfairly eliminated cost-of-living increases for many GAO employees and frozen the salaries of others."

"In its advice to other agencies, GAO encourages meaningful employee involvement as a critical element of successful personal management change," GAO senior analyst John Vocino told IFPTE. "It is time we led by example here at GAO. There is no question many of management’s recent missteps could have been avoided had employees been union-represented during the planning, adoption, and implementation of personnel management changes."

GAO’s workers drew support from 22 lawmakers. "The GAO Personnel Act grants employees the right to engage in self-organizational activities freely and without fear of penalty or reprisal and with labor-management relations…consistent with the law that governs other federal employees," they wrote Walker. "Now that they have chosen to exercise this right, we want to ensure they can proceed free from interference."

Signers of the letter included Senate Labor Committee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), House Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), House Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Von Hollen (D-Md.), both Maryland senators, and two GOP representatives.