AFGE and the Defense Health Agency (DHA) have reached an interim master labor agreement that will improve working conditions for 38,000 bargaining unit employees AFGE represents.
A few highlights of the contract:
“This agreement is effective immediately and ensures basic union rights and protections for all of the DHA employees now represented by AFGE,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley.
AFGE will be training locals on the new contract starting next month and will also be working with the agency to schedule joint labor-management trainings on the new agreement.
AFGE is also in the process of setting up a council to represent health care employees working for DHA around the world. Once it’s finalized, the DHA bargaining unit will be one of the five largest agency-level bargaining units within AFGE.
The Department of Defense has transferred 45,000 health care employees from the Army, Navy, and Air Force to DHA, which previously comprised a few thousand civilian health care workers at military hospitals in the D.C. metro region. The transfer, which began in July 2022, was mandated by Congress in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. It was the largest reorganization in the Defense Department since 1947.
AFGE represented over half of the employees who were being transferred to DHA, while the rest were either unrepresented or represented by other, smaller unions. AFGE filed unit clarification requests with the FLRA to continue representing workers who were AFGE members. Our petitions also included requests to represent other health care workers being transferred to DHA, and the FLRA last year ruled in favor of our union.
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