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Defense Employees Celebrate Repeal of Anti-Worker Personnel System |
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After a tough six-year battle, U.S. Department of Defense employees are celebrating a major victory today. The 2010 Defense authorization congressional conference committee yesterday repealed the anti-worker National Security Personnel System (NSPS).
Created by the Bush administration, the NSPS was fatally flawed from the beginning. The personnel system took away Defense Department workers’ right to collective bargaining and personnel appeals. After the last Republican-led Congress refused to block the NSPS, the United Department of Defense Workers Coalition (UDWC) worked tirelessly to restore fairness and equity to the workplace. Members of the coalition, made up of the 36 unions that represent Defense Department workers, helped get out the vote to ensure a Democratic majority in Congress and that majority restored the Defense workers’ collective bargaining rights as part of the 2009 Defense authorization bill.
Yesterday’s action puts the final nail in the NSPS coffin, repealing the entire system. Workers had complained that the pay structure under the system is unfair and arbitrary. “This day has been a long time coming,” says AFGE President John Gage:
NSPS was created in a poisonous atmosphere by ideologues seeking to destroy collective bargaining, federal unions and employee rights and protections. Through various defense authorization bills, some of those rights—collective bargaining and employee appeal rights—were restored. But the NSPS pay system is costly, unwieldy, discriminatory, complicated, opaque, and mistrusted by [Defense Department] civilian employees at all levels.
AFGE looks forward to working with the Department to improve the performance management and hiring systems so that the needs of the taxpayers, war fighters, and employees can all be addressed.
Even the Defense Department’s own Defense Business Board, an independent advisory committee of private-sector business leaders, said the NSPS should be scrapped. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-N.H.) introduced the language that repealed NSPS.
Gregory Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), says:
Today’s victory means that…[Defense] workers experiencing this unjust personnel system can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. It also ensures that nobody else will have to experience the nightmare known as NSPS. What was originally a blueprint to destroy the very civil service protections that have helped to create a strong, effective and cutting edge workforce to serve our nation’s fighting men and women, eventually evolved into, among other things, a pay system that is wrought with discrimination.
”What a day this is,” proclaimed Ron Ault, president of the AFL-CIO Metal Trades Department.
Success has many fathers and that is certainly true in the NSPS battle. It’s been a long, hard pull to get it done. If it hadn’t been for the UDWC and the leadership of [UDWC Chairman] Byron Charlton and the unwavering support of [AFL-CIO President Emeritus] John Sweeney, this never would have happened.
The Bush administration tried to impose similar workplace rules on 160,000 U.S. Department of Homeland Security workers, but federal courts blocked much of that effort.
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