Establish the National Partnership Council

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.