One of the supporting documents to the White House’s recent budget request contains an overview of the National Council on Federal Labor-Management Relations, citing developments such as the reduced need for formal negotiations through the collaborative and pre-decisional involvement (PDI) techniques it is promoting.
It cited as an example of cooperative projects one at EPA that gives employees the opportunity to work on a program 20 percent of the time anywhere else in the agency without leaving their home office. “In the past year, they have done 340 projects. EPA employees who participate bring new skills back, and are provided an opportunity for staff career growth without them leaving permanently or going on full time detail,” it said.
“The Council will continue to seek ways to spread these and other labor-management successes to other agencies in 2016 and 2017. One method employed by the Council has been to develop training and guidance to assist forums with successfully engaging in PDI and with using metrics to track their activities. The Council is currently gathering lessons-learned narratives which are based upon the many success stories that the Council has heard about labor-management cooperation and PDI,” it says.
“The Council is also working to identify common contract language in collective bargaining agreements and make it available to agencies and unions in contract negotiations. The goal is to find contract language that could serve as a template for agencies and labor unions in order to reduce time and resources spent by parties in the negotiation process,” it adds.
