Identify labor-management partnership as a goal of the executive branch. (The President should issue an Executive Order that identifies labor-management partnership as a goal of the executive branch and establishes the National Partnership Council.) When many people think of labor-management relations, they visualize an adversarial relationship. Depending on their viewpoint or experience, they may see management assuming a posture to protect its authority and do all it can to ensure efficiency at the cost of reduced benefits and wage cuts. Others may see unions as wanting work rules that prevent organizations or work groups from being more effective, and insisting on bargaining or grieving over the most mundane and inconsequential issues. Depending on their perspective, some people may see ideas such as labor-management partnership and cooperation simply as code words for allowing managers to bypass unions to get employees to work harder, faster, and less wisely, with fewer protections. Others may see cooperative initiatives simply as opportunities for unions to bargain over pay, organization mission, and goals, and receive more concessions in work and seniority rules, benefits, and protections for ineffective workers. The Executive Order would dispel these images. It would make it clear that the goal is an entirely new concept of labor-management relations. The Executive Order should contain two parts and be accompanied by a presidential statement, as outlined below. Executive Order, Part 1: Concepts. --- The goal of any labor-management partnership is the creation of a high-performance organization to deliver quality services to the American people in a way that integrates employee and other stakeholder interests. --- Partners work for each other, not against each other. They respect each other's contributions and have a sense of ownership of, and share in decisions that affect, the organization's products and services. --- Partners work in team environments that value contributions based on knowledge and experience, and blend these contributions to enhance quality, creativity, flexibility, and responsiveness. --- Management's role shifts from an emphasis on protecting its authority to promoting empowerment at the lowest practical levels to provide for employee and union participation. --- The union's role shifts from a reactive posture to proactive employee representation in support of agency mission accomplishment and workplace effectiveness. --- When we speak of employees and partnerships, and when employees have collectively decided to elect representatives to speak on their behalf, then the unions and employees must be treated as full partners. --- Changing the culture of the federal government requires overcoming resistance from employees and managers alike. Each naturally will believe that the change may bring certain losses of what they value. Developing a partnership in any change effort provides the institutional help to support movement to the federal workforce and organization of the future. Executive Order, Part 2: Methods. Following are some methods that should be put into place through the Executive Order to support goal attainment. The National Partnership Council may suggest other methods. --- Create the National Partnership Council to champion the partnership goal. --- Encourage the formation of similar councils or labor-management committees at appropriate levels in each agency, or adapt existing bodies to meet this purpose, and identify and/or train facilitators for these labor-management committees as needed. --- Encourage systematic training of significant portions of agency staffs (including line managers and first line supervisors) and union officials (including stewards) in alternative dispute resolution (ADR) techniques, interest-based bargaining approaches, and joint problem-solving/decisionmaking methods. The National Partnership Council. The Executive Order should provide the charter for the National Partnership Council and encourage similar partnership arrangements at a variety of levels in each agency. By October 1993, the President should announce the appointments to the council and the date it should begin its work. He should explain that achieving the partnership goal throughout the executive branch requires a knowledgeable and experienced group to champion such a change. Such change will be incremental and build on actual models and successful experiences. The council should serve as such a group and help steer the executive branch toward the partnership goal. In describing the council, the Executive Order should contain the following elements: --- Permanent members: - Deputy Secretary, Department of Labor - Deputy Director for Management, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) - Director, OPM - Chairperson, FLRA - Director, FMCS - Presidents of the three largest federal unions - Representative, Public Employee Department, AFL-CIO (to represent smaller federal unions). --- Rotating members (1-year appointments, may be extended): - Two deputy secretaries from departments other than Labor. --- Responsibilities and authority: - champion the creation and support of partnerships in the executive branch; collect and disseminate information about, and provide guidance on, partnership efforts, including results achieved; - bring together expertise both within and outside the federal government to learn about and foster partnership arrangements; - participate in the development of legislation related to the partnership goal, to include the creation of a flexible and responsive hiring system and the reform of the General Schedule classification system; and - engage in other activities that promote partnership efforts not prohibited by statute. --- Staff support and funding: - OPM, FMCS, FLRA, OMB, agencies, and unions will make staff available on a temporary or permanent basis to the council, as needed. The council will decide on the procedures for acquiring and using staff support. - The council may form permanent or temporary committees that will be responsible for specific issues or projects. --- Council's objective: the Executive Order should charge the council with proposing to the President statutory changes needed to help make the partnership goal a reality. The council should be responsible for deciding on the process for developing the proposals. The process should: - model the partnership concepts and decisionmaking techniques the council is championing; - involve stakeholders both within and outside the executive branch; - build on the work already done by the NPR multi- stakeholder problem-solving team; and - produce a strategy to build the political consensus necessary to enact major changes in the statutory framework. Agency Partnership Committees and Councils. The Executive Order should encourage each agency to foster partnerships with employee unions. This may involve creating, at various levels, processes and groups to foster partnerships, or adapting existing structures and processes to meet this need. Each agency should be responsible for the form this takes. However, agencies should be asked to ensure that their processes and groups --- foster partnerships that move the organization toward high performance and support the agencies' quality improvement and culture change efforts as well the agencies' goals and missions, --- support the efforts of the National Partnership Council, --- share the results of agency partnership efforts, --- take the lead in ensuring that agency staff gain skills and knowledge in joint problem solving, group facilitation, interest- based bargaining, and alternative dispute resolution techniques, and --- evaluate progress focusing specifically on improvements in organizational performance resulting from the partnership. Presidential Statement. The presidential statement will accompany and provide the rationale for the Executive Order and make the case for the partnership by articulating the following: --- The partnership goal means that agency mission achievement will be jointly and continually pursued through "innovative approaches that maximize the contributions of individual employees, managers and the Union" working together to achieve these objectives, as outlined, for example, in the 1992 IRS-NTEU partnership agreement. --- Collective bargaining will take place less in an adversarial setting with parties bringing their positions to the table, but increasingly through interest-based bargaining that insists upon consensus decisionmaking and trust within the partnership. --- Although grievances, complaints, and disputes are to be expected, it is envisioned that less than 10 percent of those conflicts will be settled outside the partnership. This means that formal complaint and grievance processing procedures will be used infrequently with informal dispute resolution techniques providing a foundation for the partnership. --- There is a place for disagreements, adversarial behavior, and different approaches to problems; however, these will occur prior to decisions being made because airing different viewpoints and then achieving joint decisions are the essence of partnerships. --- Requirements fixed in law will not be subject to negotiation; however, management and unions are obligated to use interest-based forms of negotiation on issues, both procedural and substantive, dealing with conditions of employment that significantly affect the operation of the organization.
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