The ongoing pilot projects to allow bargaining over so-called permissive subjects may be too narrowly focused to give an accurate picture of how they would impact agency operations if used more widely, the president of the Senior Executives Association, Carol Bonosaro, argued in written testimony to the Senate federal workforce subcommittee recently for a hearing on labor management forums in the federal government.
The pilot projects allow agencies to choose to bargain over any number of permissive subjects that include the numbers, types and grades of employees assigned to projects or tours, the technology used and means of performing work. A dozen such pilots are underway in nine agencies.
However, SEA observed that very few pilot projects are bargaining over the full range of subjects, meaning the National Council on Federal Labor-Management Relations will have a difficult time assessing the impact of extending the pilots, or if the President decided to mandate this kind of bargaining for all agencies. A decision could come in 2012 when the results are due to be reported; a follow-up Presidential order to adopt such bargaining government-wide could follow, potentially ahead of the Presidential election.
The SEA called for more pilot programs to paint a fuller picture of what expanded bargaining might entail. For her part, Bonosaro remains skeptical that management would have the needed flexibility to operate in a tight budget environment if it has to go through unions to make operational decisions on a finite level.
More pilot projects of course could delay the evaluation phase significantly, and is reminiscent of what happened under the Clinton administration, where management stalling effectively prevented full bargaining from ever being implemented.
