MANAGEMENT THREATENS BLACKS IN GOVERNMENT BUT INVOLVES ITSELF IN THE UNION ELECTION

The Energy Chapter of Blacks In Government (BIG) was put on notice by U.S. Dept. of Energy management that their privilege of signing up new members inside DOE facilities could be suspended, based on allegations by NTEU Chapter 213 officials claiming improper interference in a union election. The correspondence between Richard A. Reda, Director of Employee/Labor Relations, and Carolyn M. Haylock, President of the Energy Chapter of BIG, is reproduced at this web site ( http://omnist.com/COFE/reda.htm and http://omnist.com/COFE/haylock.htm ). Mr. Reda raises salient points of laws and rules governing labor rights, with which we wholeheartedly agree. What the letter from Rick Reda fails to mention, however, is how top management and the local union chapter officials have themselves collaborated in an improper fashion.

First, a little background information is in order. The union election was, by union rules, supposed to be held in March of this year. The terms of the current union officials ended that month, but they have continued in office (on uncertain authority) controlling the elections process, which they were responsible for delaying, and in control of the financial records of the local, which have not been audited for more than a decade.

The local chapter officials, acting as an Executive Committee, not only caused the election delay, but then instructed the Election Committee to shorten the period in which nominations could be submitted. The union president then attempted to have the Election Committee disqualify the nominations of an opposing slate, which would have left the current president, Ellis Maupin, as the unopposed candidate for that office. Wisely, the Elections Committee certified the opposing slate and provided its justification to the National, but the incumbent union officials seem intent on impeding a free election.

The same Executive Committee has failed to conduct or assure the audit of the union's books, and official public records filed annually show discrepancies reported during two years of the tenure of the current president of over $9,000. Those same public records indicate that the current president was apparently signing checks on the union's bank account before he was first elected to office or authorized to make or approve expenditures. Given the ongoing controversy over the union president withdrawing union support of the May 5 Demonstration literally on the evening before, and then working to sabotage attendance by union members, a number of serious questions arise.

Why did extensive cooperation between the union and senior Departmental officials only begin after the election process was underway? In fact, it only began when the Secretary of Energy was actively trying to stop a planned Demonstration which the union was co-sponsoring. The official announcement of a forum was first made on the morning of May 5, and there were no plans for the forum on May 4. The forum was announced as a partnership between NTEU Chapter 213, Women in Energy Chapter of Federally Employed Women (WE-FEW), and the Office of the Deputy Secretary.

What is especially peculiar about this suddenly announced partnership event is both that nothing whatever was said the day before, on May 4, at an official union membership meeting, and that the forum sponsorship was not approved by the union. It was solely a decision by the president without even consulting his Executive Committee.

In addition, WE-FEW, another membership organization, had no meeting to approve its co-sponsorship. That was decided solely by the close collaborator of Ellis Maupin and unelected president of WE-FEW, Cynthia Brawner-Gaines. In the case of WE-FEW, formed in the first half of last year, there have been few meetings, and no official bylaws issued, as Ms. Brawner-Gaines, active within the FEW National organization, continues to act with only assumed authority.

But, the collaboration of NTEU and top management did not end with the May 5 forum. A Dialogue on Race was held on June 1 with co-sponsorship of the NTEU, the office of the Deputy Secretary, and the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity. Once again, no approval of the NTEU co-sponsorship was attained from the membership or the Executive Committee. More curious, however, no effort was made to involve the Secretary's Diversity Council, started under Secretary Hazel O'Leary, which initiated a Dialogue effort more than a year ago, but has had little to no support from any part of management, once again. Indeed, Ellis Maupin, union president, has repeatedly stated his opposition to the Secretary's Diversity Council, and senior advisors to Secretary Richardson have proposed replacing the highly independent Secretary's Diversity Council with a management-controlled body of selected group representatives.

Why would management deem a membership drive by Blacks In Government to be potential interference in a union election, but not see interference in the conspicuous and sudden co-sponsorship with the Union of several forums initiated only after the beginning of the union election process, itself conducted in questionable fashion, and starting with the direct sabotage of a planned Demonstration?

What seems apparent to the Coalition Of Federal Employees is that organizations truly representing their memberships and acting as effective employee advocates, are likely to encounter subtle and direct efforts by management to limit their growth and action, but organizations which ignore or manipulate their membership to serve management's interests are likely to gain management's collaboration. By law, management is both not supposed to interfere, and is supposed to act and bargain in good faith.

These recent events demonstrate that organizations, charged with legal mandates they fail to carry out, are nonetheless quick to manage cosmetically appealing show-boat events with little substance or chance of bringing real change to the Department's practices. The Office of Economic Impact and Diversity (ED) is an excellent example of this, sponsoring many Special Emphasis events but failing to properly carry out the mandates both of its Office of Civil Rights and its Office of Disadvantaged Business Utilization.

COFE believes the charges against BIG are both specious and without merit, but also believes that the forums being sponsored are little more than public relations ploys by a union president seeking to manipulate an election win, on one hand, and an Office of Economic Impact and Diversity seeking to mask its deficiencies and dereliction, on the other. A good illustration of this point was hammered home in the Race Dialogue forum itself, where the conspicuous absence of most management officials, senior or otherwise, was well noted and remarked.

Moreover, after the Deputy Secretary departed an hour into the almost three-hour forum, the stand-in moderator and Director of Economic Impact and Diversity, Sarah Summerville, proceeded to incur the audience's high vocal dissatisfaction on several occasions by cutting off speakers rudely and abruptly and generally displaying an arrogant and impatient attitude unbecoming the Department's senior most official charged with a diversity mission. Ms. Summerville furthermore displayed an appalling lack of familiarity with a workforce policy so basic to career development and diversity in Federal Service as the Upward Mobility Program.

There was as well a serious challenge to a major thesis of the forum, that racial discrimination is the primary problem. A number of speakers made the point that discrimination, favoritism, and the buddy system go hand-in-hand; that employees defending rules or rights are often equally the targets of abuses of power and poor or corrupt management practices. COFE strongly supports the opinion that abusive management uses whatever means best serve its purposes to isolate manipulate, and intimidate employees into accepting abuse, overlooking wrongdoing, and otherwise acquiescing to systemic and institutional corruption. Racism and favoritism are but tools with which to divide and conquer the workforce, not only inflaming tensions between different groups and categories of employees, but often even more within those groups, yet hidden behind the mask of conventional bias, prejudice, and stereotypes.

The Race Dialogue panelists concluded that an "inventory" of issues, concerns, and actions was needed in the Department of Energy. But as COFE pointed out, that inventory already exists, both on the COFE web site ( http://omnist.com/COFE/COFE wants.htm ) and within the agendas of various employee advocacy organizations ( http://www.angelfire.com/md/CEO/ ), from BIG to the Hispanic Association of the Department of Energy (HADOE), the Energy Chapter of Gay, Lesbian Or Bisexual Employees (GLOBE), the Disability Task Force, the Secretary's Diversity Council, and even NTEU and WE-FEW. Many earlier groups have presented "inventories" whose agendas have yet to be completed. It is long past time to move from dialogue and delay to direct action and real progress.

At the same time we say this, we wish to applaud the policies and efforts of the Secretary of Energy to achieve real change. But, he must hold management accountable. This very situation is illustrative of precisely what COFE and its partners reported to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Energy as one of the chief reasons for the May 5 Demonstration. Too many managers continue to perform poorly, resist his clear direction, undermine his direct orders, and fail to heed laws, rules, and policies of the Federal Government. Yet, when the data on awards are examined, a small fraction of senior executives get less than the highest performance rating, a slightly higher but still small fraction of managers and supervisors get less than the highest rating, yet fully half of subordinate employees are so rated.

Senior executives approved for awards are guaranteed at least 5 percent of salary, but subordinate employees are limited to 3.2 percent. This is an incentive system for the already highly paid, but a disincentive system for the vast majority of the workforce. Managers continue to be rewarded when they have been shown to cause legitimate grievances, complaints, and other actions by employees, and rewarded disproportionately, as if $20,000 were needed to motivate someone already earning $120,000 per year, but employees earning much less should somehow be satisfied with $100 on-the-spot awards, or time off with no additional pay. These facts erode confidence in management.

To this structural economic discrimination, we must also add the built-in grade stratification of occupational classes by which clerical and subordinate secretarial employees are kept in one-grade interval positions, the qualifications and duties of which are not held to satisfy the requirements of substantially the same work in two-grade interval position in administrative, professional, and technical series. The so-called civil service reforms proposed under Vice President Gore that create "broad-banding" of salary ranges nonetheless maintain this structural discrimination.

When one considers that most incumbents of the one-grade interval positions are female and disproportionately minority, the implications become appallingly obvious. There is no justification for the arbitrary separation and occupational discrimination. Functional job analysis has long allowed a more task-specific assessment of skill requirements and capabilities.

One can only wonder why the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity does not sponsor a serious ongoing symposium or task force on the elimination of structural barriers to occupational segregation or on a more rational, equitable, and productive allocation of training and development resources - both of which efforts would do more to alleviate and eliminate racial, gender, and other social disparities than further discussions of history-laden attitudes about inequality that too often degenerate into mutually destructive and negatively reinforcing self-justifying arguments and rationalizations.

In a knowledge-based workforce so dependent on continuing education and development as the Department of Energy, why is there so much more attention focused on displacing and reducing the existing workforce with contracting out than on upgrading the skills and other competencies of career employees? Amazingly, the incumbent union president endorses hiring a full-time expert in contracting out career jobs.

The reason, of course, why organizations like Blacks In Government are now attracting more members is because they are doing more to challenge the orthodoxy of "reinvention" and other misconstrued or poorly adapted notions. Progress is necessary, but progress must be about people, or it cannot be called progress. If managers such as Rick Reda were more diligent in enforcing rules and policies in the behavior of management then there would be considerably more credibility in their criticisms of employee advocacy organizations.