AFGE was founded in 1932 under one of the most challenging times in our nation’s history. America was still trying to survive the Great Depression after the stock market crashed and banks collapsed. President Herbert Hoover imposed a 15% pay cut on government employees. A year later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president and vetoed a bill that would restore the pay cut. AFGE successfully mobilized members to get Congress to override the veto and stop the government from balancing its budget on the workers’ back. Besides pay, we worked hard to prevent furloughs, protect members’ jobs, retirement, promotions, among other things.
Almost 92 years later, we are still doing all these and more as we face an increase in attacks from anti-worker forces whose goal is to end collective bargaining in the federal government and get rid of unions. Below is a quick recap of things that we are still working on and will need all hands on deck.
1. Pay
The federal government is still very much balancing its budget on the workers’ backs. Federal employees today earn 27.5% less than those doing similar jobs in the private sector. To help close the pay gap, AFGE urges Congress to pass The FAIR Act that would provide a 7.4% pay increase for federal workers next year.
2. The merit system
There have been attempts to weaken due process rights, competitive hiring, union representation. In some cases, they already succeeded. A few years ago Congress passed a bill that drastically altered the right to appeal adverse actions and terminations at the Department of Veterans Affairs. It superseded collective bargaining agreements, shortened adverse action timeframes and lowered evidentiary standards for managers.
At the Department of Defense, a pilot program limits all attorneys and cybersecurity workers to terms of two to eight years. Nonrenewal of a term is a firing with no appeal right, and no accountability for corrupt personnel practices.
Bills that target just one agency or one group of federal employees within an agency do not mean that civil service protections for everyone else are safe. In each case, these bills are a first step toward undermining the apolitical civil service, inviting politicization, and increasing privatization of government work.
3. Workplace rights and protections
Lawmakers whose goal is to get rid of workplace due process, cut pay, and reduce or eliminate health insurance and retirement benefits for federal workers, or just privatize everything must first eliminate the biggest obstacle in their path: federal employee unions.
There are many ways they can get rid of unions, including ending official time for union reps so we can’t represent workers, and prohibit the deduction of union dues from employees’ paychecks to weaken our finances. To make sure that AFGE members on the job have representatives with the time and resources to fight back when employees’ rights are violated, we must protect official time and dues deduction.
4. The Fiscal Commission
Americans value Social Security and Medicare, the popular social insurance programs they pay into and rely on during their golden years. Over 80% of registered voters from across the political spectrum not only oppose cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits but also support increasing funding for these programs. Yet there have been attempts by politicians and special interests to gut them, and they’re doing it behind closed doors via a so-called fiscal commission.
Congress is considering the Fiscal Commission Act of 2023 (H.R. 5779) introduced by Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., that would establish a fiscal commission that would raise eligibility ages and cut benefits to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs.
The last such commission, known as Simpson-Bowles, issued a set of recommendations for cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and federal employee compensation. The only ones enacted were cuts to the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS). As a result, federal employees hired after 2013 pay far more for their retirement than coworkers hired before that date. If a benefit-slashing commission is established again, it must be prohibited from using federal retirement benefits to achieve budget savings. The administration and Congress should strongly oppose any effort to cut social insurance programs and/or federal employee compensation either through a fiscal commission or by other means.
5. Privatization
Agencies should manage their in-house workforces by budgets and workloads instead of arbitrary personnel caps, freezes, and cuts. Hiring freezes and/or arbitrary constraints on the number of civilian federal employees force managers to use contractors, even when they cost more, or the work is inherently governmental.
Congress should continue to ban the use of OMB Circular A-76, the process used to contract out federal work, until OMB rewrites it to correct its many flaws. The ban should also continue until agencies comply with Congress’s mandate that they inventory their service contracts so that the numbers and costs associated with the contractor workforce become known for purposes of budget planning and learning how much inherently governmental work has been improperly outsourced. If agencies have work to do and money to pay for that work, then they should be allowed to use federal employees.
The Office of Personnel Management last week took a huge step toward aligning the locality pay maps for employees on the Federal Wage System and General Schedule.
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Members of AFGE’s DEFCON Steering Group met along with AFGE staff and elected leaders to discuss ways to better serve employees throughout the DoD in the year ahead.
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