by Mike Hall, Jun 21, 2006

More than 700,000 Defense Department workers have won another round in their fight against the Bush administration’s attack on workplace rights.

The House of Representatives voted June 20 to ban the department from implementing parts of a new personnel system that guts collective bargaining and civil service rights.
 
The amendment to the fiscal year 2007 Defense Department appropriations bill was decided on a voice vote, perhaps because many Republicans supported the ban and the administration didn’t want to be embarrassed. The amendment prohibits the department from using any funds to implement its National Security Personnel System (NSPS) that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been trying to impose since 2004.
 
The more than 30 unions that represent department workers joined together in the United DoD Workers Coalition (UDWC) to fight the new rules and preserve workplace rights.
 
Said Ron Ault , president of the AFL-CIO’s Metal Trades Department, which represents many of the unions in the coalition:

It goes without saying that today’s victory is a huge step toward putting this blatant attack on DoD’s workforce to rest.

The appropriations bill must still win final House approval, and the Senate then must pass it. The amendment needs to survive a House-Senate conference and White House pressure to kill the pro-worker amendment
 
As the bill moves through Congress, Gregory Junemann, president of the Professional & Technical Engineers said:

All of the member unions of the UDWC will continue to work hand in hand to put an end to NSPS.

In February, a federal judge ruled in the coalition’s suit against the NSPS that it “fails to ensure even minimal collective bargaining rights” and blocked the department from imposing the new rules. The Defense Department has appealed the ruling.

The new personnel rules would scrap decades of federal civil service laws. The rules would replace civil service pay grades and promotion rules and limit the issues that can be discussed in contract bargaining by taking pay and work rules off the table.

(Click here to find out more about the NSPS from AFGE, which represents some 200,000 Defense Department workers.)

Last August, in a decision on similar Bush-proposed workplace rules for the 160,000 workers in Homeland Security, U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said, “The regulations fail in their obligation to ensure collective bargaining rights to DHS employees.”

Federal workers and their unions have been making the same argument since the Bush White House announced its plans in 2004 to make sweeping changes in federal personnel practices.

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