The Foreign Service Journal, September 2015

48 SEPTEMBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL has been in five agencies reaching an agreed position. Once a position has finally been reached, the tendency is to attempt to ram it down the unions’ throats, since the alternative is clear- ance of any counterproposal through each agency again. While the chief negotiators for AFSA and AFGE have wide author- ity, the lack of authority of the management team has greatly handicapped these negotiations. Agency Disarray The unions, however, don’t have such a problem. The State and AID negotiators are members of the AFSA Governing Board. AFGE’s negotiator is the president of AFGE Local 1812. The union decision-makers are there. They get along, they have their instructions, they know what they want. They can usually formulate counterproposals swiftly—the record so far is 10 minutes. In short, the unions’ representatives are ready to negotiate and expect the same from the other side of the table. With a few exceptions, these expectations have not been met. Even to formulate a common initial position seems to take the five agencies an inordinate amount of time. For example, a year after the act became effective, the agencies were still arguing about “incentive pay” and what proposal should be submitted for negotiation. AFSA and AFGE submitted a joint proposal to try to force the subject to the bar- gaining table. So far, no luck. The unions could file an unfair labor practice charge, but this would delay things another few months. We have only recently received management’s proposed Standardized Regulations on Special Incentive Dif- ferential. These define the limits under which the implement- ing regulations can be negotiated. The standardized regula- tions themselves are not negotiable, and on SID and “danger pay” management has used this non-negotiability to restrict severely the benefits that are negotiable. In other words, the intent of the act has been unilaterally interpreted by manage- ment in a manner that gives us much less than we feel was intended by Congress. “Advance of pay” is another example. AFSA is not stupid! We don’t like irate members; we want to get needed benefits as soon as possible. But at what price? We had submitted pro- posal after proposal on advance of pay. When agreement could not be reached, we tried mediation. We sat in one room trying to find a formula everyone could buy while management sat in another room saying no to each proposal. The issue had to go to the Federal Labor Relations Authority’s Foreign Service Impasse Disputes Panel. Why? Basically because the man- agement of one of the agencies was afraid employees would “misuse” this benefit Congress wanted the Foreign Service to have. Finally, the impasse panel recommended that AFSA’s recommendation be accepted. Management agreed, and the new regulations should be out by the time you read this. The association has been told that these five-agency, two- union negotiations are unique in federal labor-management history. We sincerely hope no one else is subjected to this process. Soon Congress will be holding hearings on the prog- ress of the implementation of the Foreign Service Act, and the association will testify. It will be interesting to hear how Con- gress feels about this unique negotiating procedure, which has frustrated the substantive goal of achieving improved regula- tions in a timely fashion. AFSA’s chief negotiator has described the last year as not only frustrating but disappointing. And we are beginning to fear that far from achieving the healthy and efficient compatibility among the agencies that is called for in the act, we are ending up in many cases with a sort of lowest- common-denominator blandness that offends no one, changes little and is principally cosmetic in nature. n —The 1982 AFSA Governing Board