Federal Labor-Management Relations Reforms Under Bush

• Date: 01 June 2007
• Published date: 01 June 2007
• Author: James R. Thompson
• DOI: 10.1177/0734371X06294365
• Subject Matter: Articles

Review of Public Personnel
Administration
Volume 27 Number 2
June 2007 105-124
© 2007 Sage Publications
Federal Labor-Management
10.1177/0734371X06294365
http://roppa.sagepub.com
Relations Reforms
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Under Bush
Enlightened Management or Quest for Control?
James R. Thompson
University of Illinois–Chicago
The Bush administration is promoting radical change to the labor-management relations
status quo in the federal sector. Provisions of the 1978 Federal Service Labor-Management
Relations Statute already leave the federal employee unions in a disadvantageous posi-
tion vis-à-vis management. The changes by President Bush would tip the balance of
power even further in favor of management. Are those changes an attempt to expand
presidential control over the bureaucracy, or do they simply represent an alternative,
promanagement philosophy of workplace relations? The conclusion here is that Bush
has adopted a political management model of governance in which operational consid-
erations are subordinate to control considerations.
Keywords:
labor-management relations; civil service reform; human resource
management; public management; public employee unions
With approximately 1.9 million employees,1 the federal government is the
largest and most prominent public-sector employer in the country. As such,
the practices it engages in with regard to its employees achieve substantial visibility
and serve to set a tone for labor relations practices in the public sector more broadly.
President Kennedy’s 1962 executive order authorizing collective bargaining in the
federal government set the stage for a decade in which the proportion of public-
sector workers who became union members increased dramatically. President Reagan’s
confrontation with the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981 set the tone for a decade
during which unions were continually on the defensive.
Recent actions by the Bush administration may portend another era of adversarial
labor-management relations. As discussed below, President George W. Bush has taken a
series of aggressive, antiunion actions, canceling an executive order issued by his prede-
cessor that directed federal agencies to cooperate with union representatives in address-
ing common issues, withdrawing collective bargaining rights from multiple groups of
federal employees based on national security considerations, and significantly narrow-
ing the scope of issues over which unions in two of the largest federal departments are
permitted to bargain. These actions are justified based on the argument that enhanced
managerial control of the workplace leads to improved organizational performance.
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Review of Public Personnel Administration
This article chronicles developments in labor relations practices in the federal
sector for the period 2001-2006. Of particular interest is the design of the new per-
sonnel systems for the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense (DoD),
which will include approximately 760,000 of the government’s 1.9 million civilian
employees. The labor-management relations provisions of those models represent a
significant departure from the status quo. A union lawyer describes the new DHS
rules on labor-management relations as “a wholesale assault on the concepts of col-
lective bargaining and grievance/arbitration.”2
This article probes the nature of those changes with a particular focus on whether
and to what extent they are based on a coherent management philosophy or, alterna-
tively, represent an attempt to expand presidential control over the federal bureaucracy.
Attention is also directed to the likely outcomes of the application of these new poli-
cies in the federal workplace. A detailed discussion of the Bush reforms is preceded by
a brief review of the history of labor-management relations in the federal sector.
History of Labor-Management Relations
in the Federal Government
Federal employees first gained the right to organize collectively under the Lloyd-
LaFollette Act of 1912. They were not allowed to bargain collectively with manage-
ment, however, until President Kennedy issued Executive Order (EO) 10988 in
1962. Even under EO 10988, the scope of issues over which the unions were per-
mitted to bargain was extremely limited. It is important to note that issues relating
to pay and benefits were excluded from negotiation, instead to be determined by the
president and Congress without union participation. In 1969, President Nixon issued
Executive Order 11491, which replaced EO 10988 and which created an adminis-
trative structure for the bargaining process.
Not until the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was the right of federal employees
to bargain collectively actually codified. Title VII of that law, the Federal Service Labor-
Management Relations Statute (FSLMRS), incorporated the restrictive provisions of
EOs 10988 and 11491 by prohibiting negotiations over pay and benefits and by pro-
hibiting strikes by federal employees. Masters and Albright (2003) comment on
FSLMRS as follows: “Unions had a very limited scope of bargaining, no right to strike,
no right to the arbitration of impasses (without management consent), no union-security
protections, and a fearsome management rights clause emblazoned in statute” (p. 176).
The consensus among observers is that the experience under FSLMRS has not been
particularly positive; in the absence of authority to bargain over wages and benefits, dis-
cussions between unions and management, at least until Clinton’s partnership experi-
ment, tended to focus on peripheral matters. In a 1991 report, the General Accounting
Office characterized the labor-management relations experience under FSLMRS as
“adversarial and often plagued by litigation over procedural matters and minutiae” (U.S.

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Thompson / Federal Labor-Management Relations
107
General Accounting Office [U.S. GAO], 1991, p. 2). Robert Tobias (2005), former pres-
ident of the National Treasury Employees Union, describes the somewhat dysfunctional
relationship that evolved between unions and management under FSLMRS as follows:
Unions feared that if they accepted a management proposal that constricted the scope
of bargaining, it would set a precedent that could be used by managers in a subsequent
or parallel negotiation. Conversely, unions aggressively sought to use the negotiation
and litigation process to set a precedent that might minimally expand the scope of bar-
gaining, crafting bargaining proposals that may or may not have addressed the real
problem in the workplace. . . . Real issues were rarely addressed directly and were
never finally resolved. (p. 355)
The accession to the presidency of William Clinton in 1993 brought about a tem-
porary change in the labor-management environment. As an element of his manage-
ment reform initiative, the National Performance Review, Clinton issued EO 12871,
creating a National Partnership Council including union and management officials,
“to advise the President on matters involving labor-management relations in the
executive branch” (Clinton, 1993).3 The EO further directed federal agencies to
engage in partnerships with their respective unions. The partnership idea derived
from the experience of some private-sector companies that have engaged their
unions at a strategic level, thereby attempting to gain union cooperation in strategy
execution. In the EO, Clinton (1993) stated that “only by changing the nature of
Federal labor-management relations so that managers, employees, and employees’
elected union representatives serve as partners will it be possible to design and
implement comprehensive changes necessary to reform government” (p. 1).
The following 7-plus years were characterized by relative harmony in labor-
management relations; management in many agencies consulted with union represen-
tatives on issues that were technically outside the scope of bargaining. A 2001
evaluation of the partnership program by the U.S. OPM (Masters, 2001) listed issues
that received the attention of partnership councils, including quality of work life,
human resource policies, customer service, and technology. Although the OPM
report concluded that partnerships had little impact on the “bottom line,” in the form
of measurable improvements in productivity or service quality, the survey did iden-
tify improvements in the labor-management climate more generally as an outcome.4
Marick Masters of the University of Pittsburgh, author of the report, commented that
It is precisely through improvements in labor-management communication, the labor
relations climate, and opportunity for employee involvement and empowerment that the
real tangible, long-term results of partnering in general and labor-management partner-
ship councils in particular were to be realized. (p. 48)
Sixty-three percent of the management and union officials surveyed by Masters
agreed that labor-management relationships had improved either “some” or “very
much” since the issuance of EO 12871 (Masters, 2001).

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Review of Public Personnel Administration
The improvement in “atmospherics” did lead to some cost savings by contribut-
ing to a reduction in the number of formal challenges to management made by
employees or by unions. A separate analysis shows declines in each of four major
dispute indicators during the 1992-2000 period:
• unfair labor practice charges declined from 8848 to 5638
• bargaining impasses declined from 253 to 167
• appeals to the FLRA declined from 115 to 65
• arbitration cases declined from 188...