House Moves to Defund Anti-Worker NSPS

by Donna Jablonski, Aug 5, 2007

With an amendment to Defense Department appropriations legislation, the U.S. House of Representatives last night moved to defund the anti-worker National Security Personnel System (NSPS) civil service policy. The amendment, which essentially called for an end to NSPS, passed without objection on a voice vote.

NSPS, which the Bush administration pushed through Congress in 2003 by exploiting post-9/11 terrorism fears, destroyed collective bargaining rights for Defense Department civilian employees, threatened their wages and eliminated their right to appeal serious disciplinary action.

Following last night’s vote, Greg Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), said the House action was a “huge step in the right direction toward bringing fairness back” to Defense Department employees:

As we all know, NSPS was an ideological experiment…created for the purposes of destroying the pay, collective bargaining, civil service and veterans’ preference protections enjoyed by DoD workers, not for national security purposes as some in the Pentagon would lead you to believe.

Since NSPS was enacted, it has been the subject of fights in Congress and the courts by Defense employees and their unions. In July, the Government Accountability Office revealed that the cost to implement NSPS would far exceed the $158 million claimed by the Bush administration.

Junemann credited Reps. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), Walter Jones (R-N.C.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) with leading the fight for the amendment to defund NSPS.

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