NTEU
Statement to the NRC Commission
Human Capital & EEO
April 16, 2009
Edited for Clarity
Contact Dale Yeilding in the NTEU Union office O1G22 with any
questions 301-415-3600.
INDEX OF TOPIC
Presented by Dale Yeilding
Thanks for:
Transit Subsidy
Childcare Subsidy
Credit Monitoring
HR-Labor Relations Not
Represented
at Human Capital Commission Briefing
No Employee EEO Committee Involvement
Streamline Hiring vs. Getting the Right Applicant:
Agency Reports to Congress Eligible Telework Positions increases from 1000 to 2500
Negotiate Policy Change - The Law
New Supervisors Supervise Without Training
UNITED STATES NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
BRIEFING ON HUMAN CAPITAL AND
EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY
THURSDAY
April 16, 2009
The Commission convened at 1:30 p.m., the Honorable Dale E.
Klein, Chairman presiding.
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
DALE E. KLEIN, CHAIRMAN
GREGORY B. JACZKO, COMMISSIONER
PETER B. LYONS, COMMISSIONER
KRISTINE L. SVINICKI, COMMISSIONER
...
CHAIRMAN KLEIN: Thanks. Any final questions? Well, thank all of you for a great --
MR. McDERMOTT: Dale should get a chance to say a word.
CHAIRMAN KLEIN: I did not have that request on my list.
MR. YEILDING: Thank you, Jim, for reminding. Thank you, Chairman and Commissioners. My name is Dale Yeilding. I'm the local chapter president of the National Treasury Employees Union and by law I always get the last five or 10 minutes to speak.
I came in here with just a small card, and I've got it filled, so I hope not to take a full 10 minutes, but maybe I will. I'll start off on a positive note. I like to extend some thanks. Being the exclusive representative of NRC employees, I'd like to thank the Commission and senior management for several things.
THANKS: One is raising the transit subsidy. I was the first one to remind HR the day after Obama signed the Recovery Act that IRS regulation lifted the $120 limit to $230 for transit subsidy and the agency was fairly prompt in implementing that new provision of law. So, thanks for that on behalf of employees.
I'd like to thank the agency for raising childcare subsidy. The agency had a $40,000 budget last year and only about $8,000 was distributed because not enough NRC low-income families qualified under the agency prescribed limitations. The agency responded by raising the maximum family income ceiling. They sat down at the negotiating table with me and we've raised other parameters and we're going to take a look at if we raise them enough to see if we can get more money out the door on an annual basis to approach the now $50,000 childcare budget. So, thanks for that.
I'd like to thank the Commission for credit monitoring. I think credit monitoring was a Commission initiative in the event of a personally identifiable information (PII) breach by the agency to pay for affected employee credit monitoring. PII involves personal information such as addresses, Social Security numbers, and whatever, that would affect the possible security and financial integrity of employees. Credit monitoring costs about $25 a year per employee. A negative aspect of that policy change is for certain low-level breaches which the agency categorizes as not significant, employees will not be notified. So, I'm at the bargaining table to represent employees and ensure they will be notified for any agency breach of PII to protect their financial integrity. Hopefully, the agency will see the light and report to employees any actual or potential breach that is reportable to the Department of Homeland Security. So, that's the end of the thanks.
Human Resource Labor Relations Not Represented at Human Capital Commission Briefing: Let me turn to being a little critical now. It looks like Mr. McDermott has just about everybody on his human resource team sitting at the table except one very important aspect of his department and that's labor relations. There was no part of this briefing at all that dealt with labor relations. Labor relations is not just dealing with the National Treasury Employees Union, but dealing with all aspects of what Jim has responsibility for: disciplining employees, coaching managers with conflict. So, that is a significant aspect.
Collective Bargaining: I'm not going to bring our current term negotiations subjects to this Commission briefing, but I had a coffee and doughnut meeting this morning with employees where we talked specifically for about an hour and a half to employees about the agency's proposals that definitely affect human capital to change the policies and procedures here at this agency that would retain employees. I issued an announcement about two days ago and I have put together a website that lists the issues in dispute. I've been at the bargaining table now for over 200 hours addressing human resource proposals and the union's proposals. And am sorry to say that we're only agreed to half of the contract articles. I think we're miles apart on agreement on some of the agency proposals. I don't want to get into bargaining details. In fact, I hope I can come back in six months at the next meeting and report that we signed and reached an agreement and we don't have to use impasse procedures with the Federal Service Impasse Panel. I would hope somebody is overlooking human resources who has the administrative responsibility for most of the collective bargaining agreement policies, appraisals, merit selection, annual leave, guidance of supervisors and actually take a close look at the proposals from the agency to see if the agency's proposed changes will keep the NRC the best place to work in the Federal government.
Orientation: I've been around since orientation was a full day. Competing first day forms was a segment before I had my half hour with the new employees. I just can't conceive why it's that big of a deal to have a full day of orientation for an employee the first time they come here to work for the NRC. They used to be able to watch an informative video that was very historical that showed a lot of the agency's responsibilities. There is too much emphasis to reduce orientation down from eight hours to four hours or less. I just don't understand why it's such a big deal for an extra half a day for an employee to get a fresh start on their first day with presentations from real people versus going back to the cube and getting the training from a website. .
Employee to Supervisor Ration: I've been around since the 8.5 to 1 ratio was originally an initiative because the NRC was down at the 5 to 1 ratio. Back then, we were looking at this steep supervisor-loaded structure and determine the ratio was affected by many layers of management. The push for the change to 8.5 to 1 ratio was to flatten out the structure and eliminate layers of management. And now we seem to be moving in the other direction. I'm looking for an Obama executive order that puts the ratio and staffing plan back in the permissive bargaining subjects that would require NTEU involvement. President Clinton issued an executive order that actually made the permissive subjects of numbers, types and grades or staffing plan changes negotiable and for about over five years, NTEU and the agency at the partnership table, partnered staffing plan changes and restructuring. This process was an integral part in moving the agency to the correct employee to supervisor ratio. So, why we're going in the other direction and we're asking questions of why is a first-line supervisor supervising 15 people? Well, it's because there's lots of layers of management above them and we have management deputies that double the number in a single layer. Do we need all these other extra layers of management? Because every layer of management and every deputy at a level just adds more staff to the first-line supervisor in order maintain a stable employee to supervisor ratio.
No Employee EEO Committee Involvement: I didn't hear anything at this briefing about the No Fear Act report which was recently released. I guess that's going to be every other Commission EEO Briefing. We get more of the committee involvement every other year -- or every other six month briefing rather than this one because I didn't see any of the committees members participating.
Streamline Hiring vs. Getting the Right Applicant: Lean Six Sigma. Jim [Mcdermott-Director Human Resources] was taking credit for streamlining his hiring of outside candidates and doing a lot of Lean Six Sigma to the hiring process. I remember reading a quote in "Government Executive" magazine where Jim was proud that he's trying to reduce the paperwork for new employees to get hired and he wanted to see how they're going to operate and function when he puts them to work. Well, we're tracking so many different things, maybe we should track how many failures we did by not having a very thorough and detailed analysis of the applicants (sometimes without a rating panel) to see if we are hiring the wrong people. One aspect of the resigning/separated employee's exit report, as to how long they were here, using this maybe a way to measure the effectiveness of the outside employee hiring process. If new employees last less than a year or probationary employees get fired, the recent streamlining of the outside hiring process may need a second look.
Resident Inspector Home Sale. The complaints I've heard from resident inspectors is about a provision to the agency's home purchase agreement when the government contractor purchases the relocated employee's home. I guess the previous contractor failed and had some financial troubles, but the new contractor that buys your home in order to support your transfer has a very painful appraisal process. This is the first I ever heard that there's two types of home appraisals. There's a fast sell home appraisal and that's what the agency's contractor uses. A fast-sell appraisal of your home that will sell in 90 days has a different appraisal amount than one that assumes the standard time for your home to sell. So, if you're in an economic period where homes are not selling at a fast rate and the home sale average is like nine months, that typical appraisal is going to be a lot higher value than the fast-sell appraisal, the amount the government will pay for your house. And that was the complaint I'd heard from of resident inspectors that they could not afford to sell to the government for at the 90-day appraised value and would be forced to have to sell their house themselves rather than use the home sale program.
Agency Reports to Congress Eligible Telework Positions increases from 1000 to 2500: Telework. I hope the Commission is aware that we have two types of telework: fixed-schedule telework -- one, two, three days a week. It actually can go up to five days a week with senior management approval. And we have a project-based telework. Project-based telework is just that: for a particular project. No paperwork, a handshake agreement with your boss. Project-based telework is geared towards a three hours project, three-day project, or something short with the project being portable eliminating the analysis of the position or employee since the project is scrutinized. It doesn't have to have a lot of analysis whether or not you're the right person or the right candidate because the supervisor just looks at the project. Is the project portable? Can you do it at home? Bingo! Go home and do the project.
Project-based telework is untracked, undocumented, no paper work. There's no way to report to Congress or to OPM how many people are working project-based and that's probably why it is the most successful as compared to fixed-schedule telework. The agency bean-counters would, I'm sure, love to inflate their telework numbers and establish a project-based tracking paperwork system. Project-based telework involves a relationship between the first-line supervisor and the employee without involvement of senior management. It's just a first-line supervisor that can shake the employee's hand and say, "Go home and get the project done." To bring bureaucracy, paperwork and controls into project-based will kill it. I'll protect to my tombstone the paperless aspect of project-based work at home.
Fixed-schedule work at home. Why isn't it working? I don't have the answer to that. In fact, I was the one that negotiated work at home six years ago into the collective bargaining agreement. Fixed schedule has two management controls-- Is the employee and the position eligible? Employees need to be performing at the fully successful level and without conduct infractions which qualifies close to 99% of NRC staff. Is the position eligible for telework? Well, before I signed off on that five years ago I said, "Wait a minute NRC. How many positions are you talking about before I give you carte blanche (non-grievability) for work at home?" We stopped bargaining for two months while the agency went and asked every office director/regional administrator how many positions they would make eligible for work at home? This was six or seven years ago. Back then, the agency reported one thousand eligible positions for telework. I've got stacks of staffing plans documenting this from six years ago. One thousand positions out of then 2,200 employees were eligible; about 50%.
The union was happy with that pilot telework program since the program would be immediately available to so many staff. A couple years went by and the EDO said at the union's prodding, "Hey, let's now after such pilot telework success, see if some more positions may be eligible." Office directors only reported about 100 more eligible positions after the lengthy pilot test. A report to Commissioner Merrifield documented just about 1100 eligible telework positions about four years ago.
About a year-and-a-half ago Congressman Waxman asked the agency how many positions are eligible for work at home at the NRC? The agency reported 2,500. One of the things I'm going to be asking for at the bargaining table is for the agency to go back and ask managers, "Are you really identifying all of your positions or 80% or 90% of them as eligible for work at home?" Because once a person is told that your position is eligible, then they are basically eligible considering office coverage needs. But there's a lot of offices and a lot of controlling managers that are just not making positions eligible and if we quantify that we can probably open up more work at home opportunities.
Negotiate Policy Change - The Law: NTEU and the agency are currently in term contract negotiations which occurs every four years. The agency must also negotiate interim policy changes they desire to make -- not policy in regulating the industry or policy regulating nuclear materials, but policy dealing with the workplace. That might be something that the commission tracks to determine how successful these negotiations are or if they actually occur as required by law.
The agency wanted to change the rules of behavior to access computer systems. They came with about an eight, ten page document and I rolled my eyes back and sat down with my chief steward who works in OIS and we came up with about two or three pages of comments. We sat down to bargain rules of behavior. It wasn't successful. We had two meetings. We didn't hear from the agency for a couple months. One of the Regions implemented the rules of behavior and I called foul. I said, "Stop the presses. We're still bargaining rules of behavior. How can you be implementing it?" They retracted it waiting for OIS to finish bargaining with the union. I just recently have been told that NSIR has implemented rules of behavior for its incident response teams. When HR notifies the union to bargain a policy change somebody should open up some kind of a ticket in the system and say, Are we going to complete bargaining with the union, and if necessary proceed into impasse procedures using the Federal Mediation Conciliation Service to assist.
New Supervisors Supervise without Training: One last comment here. It amazes me that we have many great training and qualification programs, and check off lists even for secretaries, but when it comes to supervisors we let them begin supervising and call for completion of training a year later. Well, I face supervisors at the grievance table or face employees feeling like they haven't been appraised properly and one of the first questions I’m always asking them is, "Do you have a new supervisor." The agency may want to consider the possible damage to both productivity and moral by placing an untrained supervisor to work.
Thank you very much.
CHAIRMAN KLEIN: Well, I think all of you for a great presentation. Obviously, as we've said before people are our greatest asset and you all do a great job of hiring, training and retaining. So, keep up the good work. And as Jeri indicated I look forward to reading that this is the best place to work in 2011, 2013 and 2015. Meeting is adjourned.
( Whereupon, meeting was adjourned.)
NTEU Working Today for a Better Tomorrow
Contact Dale Yeilding in the NTEU Union office O1G22 with any questions 301-415-3600.