A federal appeals court has upheld an Army facility’s handling of the 2013 sequester furlough, in a case involving working capital fund employees who argued that they should have been exempted because their operation is self-funding and not subject to the limits on appropriated funds that sequestration triggered.
The case, appealed from two arbitration decisions, is one of many making similar arguments. The MSPB for example recently issued a decision in favor of management recently in a comparable case.
As with the MSPB case, the arbitrators held that the furloughs were within management’s discretion because they met the “efficiency of the service” standard–specifically, that the agency was within its rights to look at the workforce as a whole when making furlough decisions, rather than considering a specific function in isolation.
The union argued that because adverse actions such as removals and suspensions are taken at the local level, the determination of the validity of furloughs at a particular location arising from an agency-wide sequestration should be assessed from the standpoint of the local level. However, the facts in a removal or suspension are local, while the furloughs involved in this case were the result of financial restraints imposed on the entire agency, the court held.
Of the more than 30,000 appeals filed in the wake of the furloughs–which hit some agencies, but not all, and required unpaid time off for only portions even of the affected workforces for varying numbers of days–only a handful have been decided in favor of the employees. In most cases those involved employees misclassified as not exempt for health, safety or similar reasons.
