August 2007: NTEU recently sought arbitration in a case involving the involuntary reassignment of several Corp Fin employees in violation of Collective Bargaining Agreement Article 17, Section 6. Under this provision, unless a reassignment is directed at specific employees for “legitimate management considerations,” the SEC is required to follow a few simple procedures prior to involuntarily reassigning employees. Volunteers are supposed to be solicited from a pool of qualified employees. If there are more volunteers than required, then the reassignments are required to be based on seniority. If there are not enough volunteers, then the reassignments are required to be based on reverse seniority. Corp Fin refused to follow these procedures in this case, and then refused to provide a reason to the union for doing so.

“The fundamental problem here is that the managers involved with this particular case have refused even to disclose to the union what they believe are their legitimate management considerations for these reassignments, even though we have met with them repeatedly about this,” Chapter 293 President Greg Gilman recently noted. “The situation here is fairly clear cut. There is a union representing the employees at this agency. The union has negotiated a contract with the SEC. That contract is legally binding and contains provisions with which the agency is required to comply. Unfortunately, there are some parts of the SEC that continue to display a management culture that seems to have difficulty accepting this fundamental reality. This leads to the unnecessary expenditure of agency time and resources on arbitrations of this sort. At the end of the day, these kinds of decisions are simply bad for employee morale, as well as recruitment and retention.”