NTEU Chapter 293 Files National Grievance Seeking Transparency in Performance Ratings

02/25/2011

2/25/11: NTEU Chapter 293 today filed a national grievance against the SEC seeking to compel the agency to provide meaningful, transparent information, in a timely fashion, regarding the distribution of performance ratings to employees in connection with their performance in the last part of FY 2010.

Last July, the SEC pressed ahead with its launch of its new performance management system in the Division of Enforcement and the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations. This was to be a "dry run" of the system, during which SEC managers would rate most Enforcement and OCIE employees, but those ratings would not count as the employees’ official ratings.  According to SEC management, this “dry run” would generate data and information about how the system works and would enable SEC management and the Union to identify appropriate adjustments before the system goes “live” for all employees in 2011. This "dry run" was completed in January.

As reported HERE last year, the Union continues to have grave reservations about this new performance management system. The SEC put this system together in what has been essentially a unilateral process, after rejecting numerous objections raised by Union representatives and dozens of bargaining unit employees who provided input on the system. This has been a major concern for the Union, particularly since the SEC's last foray into a performance management system, the "Merit Pay System," resulted in an unfair, incoherent system that lacked transparency. The Merit Pay experiment ended ignominiously with a federal arbitrator's determination that the system violated federal antidiscrimination statutes by having a discriminatory impact upon hundreds of SEC employees.

The current ratings for FY 2010 in Enforcement and OCIE have generated a wide host of complaints, not only from bargaining unit employees across the nation, but also from managers, many of whom do not even understand how they are supposed to rate their subordinates' performance under the system.

One thing is clear -- transparency will be absolutely essential under any performance management system. That is true because it will assist the Union in identifying and eliminating weaknesses in the system. It is also true because SEC employees need to see the ratings spreads to place their own individual ratings into a meaningful context.

For that reason, the Union will continue to seek to compel the SEC to provide to the Union the raw data from the ratings process. That information should be provided in a timely fashion every time the agency seeks to rate its employees. That is the way that it works in better organizations, and certainly it should be the way that it works in an organization that prizes timely disclosure as a virtue.

 Oo