| Comment Number: | OL-10510032 |
| Received: | 3/16/2005 12:10:51 AM |
| Subject: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| Title: | National Security Personnel System |
| CFR Citation: | 5 CFR Chapter XCIX and Part 9901 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
Section 9901.903 Under the proposed regulations, the definition of conditions of employment is modified so as to exclude determinations regarding pay (how could anything better fit the definition of a “condition of employment” than pay?). This will deprive unions of the ability to bargain over any aspect of pay and will deprive employees of the ability to grieve such fundamental matters as the denial of overtime or premium pay. Also, as noted earlier, the proposed regulations would forbid employees from grieving their performance ratings. DOD says it will come up with some other process for this in the future. The definition of a grievance is modified so as to disallow any grievance alleging a violation of a law, unless that law was enacted for the purpose of regulating working conditions. The Privacy Act was not enacted primarily to regulate working conditions. The First Amendment was not enacted primarily to regulate working conditions. Yet, violations of those rights can have a profound affect on the working conditions of an employee. There is no principled reason why these violations should not be remediable in the grievance procedure. The unprincipled and obvious reason is to force employees who wish to remedy the violation of their legal rights in the workplace into the more time-consuming and costly venue of federal court—on the hope that they’ll just give up.