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AFGE Family,

Last week, due to an error with our email software, less than half of you received my Friday roundup. I apologize for that, but one thing you might have missed was the announcement of the guidance that OPM put out to agencies for how they’re expected to implement President Biden’s executive orders that revoked the past administration’s 2018 orders.

Upcoming Leadership Town Hall

This week we’ve been analyzing the guidance and this coming Wednesday evening we’ll hold a leadership town hall to discuss what we need to do now that we have this guidance. This is a crucial moment for AFGE and we want to make the most of it. Remember, President Biden’s EO doesn’t just tell agencies to eliminate everything that they did to implement the Trump EOs, it goes much further by making all permissive bargaining subjects mandatory and moving forward on at least $15 per hour for all government work.

Meetings With Agency Heads

I had numerous calls this week with new cabinet secretaries and confirmed with each of them that they need to let it be known at every level of their departments and agencies that the President’s labor agenda must be a high priority and must be implemented right away. The leaders I’ve spoken with – Agriculture Secretary Vilsack, VA Secretary McDonough, DHS Secretary Mayorkas, and the candidate to become the Deputy Director for Management at OMB, Jason Miller, all agreed. They all emphasized that they had received direct orders from their boss, President Biden, to carry out the terms of the EO in full and to treat the federal workforce with the utmost respect.

I also asked each of them to commit to at least one joint agency-wide town hall with AFGE and all agreed to that as well.

VA Meeting

NVAC President Lee and I spoke to VA Secretary McDonough together. We made him understand that so many entities in VA operate with autonomy and give us the run around by saying — I can’t do anything until I hear from so-and-so, and then so-and-so says they have no authority to tell anybody to do anything. The upshot is that the word must go out from the Secretary himself that every VA operation must comply with the EO or else it won’t happen. He agreed with what we said, and promised to put something out as soon as possible, assuring us that these issues were at the top of his to-do list and his office was working on it. Like everyone else, he made a point of saying that President Biden had told him to make the EO a priority and he would carry out the President’s wishes.

Agriculture Meeting

In addition to talking about the EO, collective bargaining, official time and office space, we talked to Secretary Vilsack about line speeds in slaughterhouses, FSIS staffing, the agency’s pass-fail performance rating system, the restrictive telework rule that he’s rescinding, and hiring in D.C. for the Economic Research Service (ERS) and National Institute on Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

OMB Meeting

The conversation with Jason Miller, the DDM candidate, focused on not just the EO, but also the many issues related to both GS and WG pay that involve regulations that have died at OMB during previous administrations. In addition, we talked to him about the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) which would be under his control if he is confirmed. OFPP writes all the rules for the government’s contracting, and we asked him to produce insourcing guidance (instead of outsourcing) and to complete the contractor inventories. OMB needs data on the cost and size of the contractor workforce so that when and if cost-cutting comes, it’s not just federal employees with targets on their backs. The government spends $400 billion a year on service contractors and $200 billion on federal employees; it’s only right that they get the same budget scrutiny that we get.

DHS Meeting

Finally, today we had a meeting with Secretary Mayorkas of DHS. We talked about the need for the DHS budget request to include Title 5 GS pay rates for Transportation Security Officers. We also provided him with a new draft “determination” for the TSA Administrator that treats TSOs as if they had full Title 5 rights. We also talked about FEMA and FPS needing increased staffing, Coast Guard employees being blindsided by direct hiring that fills positions without job postings, and staffing and other operational issues for ICE attorneys. And of course, we discussed the need for the agency components to go back to the table at AFGE’s request to renegotiate according to President Biden’s EO.

Organizing

I must also mention that I had the opportunity to speak to the NVAC strategic planning conference about the need to jumpstart organizing. NVAC has been a huge engine of AFGE’s growth over the past years and organizing must be at the center of their work going forward. It is a lot to ask, I know, when we need to maximize the opportunity at the table that President Biden’s EO presents and simultaneously organize like never before. But AFGE leaders are champion multi-taskers and I know we can do it.

I hope you all saw President Biden’s speech to the nation marking the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic. His decency, compassion, and commitment to telling us the truth, combined with the hopeful announcement of everyone being eligible for vaccination starting in May was just what we all needed to hear on such a solemn occasion.

Meeting with President Biden

And last, but certainly not least, this afternoon I joined my fellow AFL-CIO union presidents in a virtual “thank you” session with President Biden to celebrate the enactment of the American Rescue Plan. This new law has tremendous benefits for AFGE members and the American people. It included an additional 14 weeks of paid emergency COVID-19 leave to cover instances of illness, care of an ill family member, or care for kids whose school or daycare is closed due to the pandemic. The law also includes the “presumption of workplace illness” so that federal workers who continued to work at the regular duty stations during the pandemic and caught COVID could qualify for FECA without having to “prove” workplace exposure. These were tremendous wins, and along with the $1,400 payments to individuals, the child allowances, and the aid to cities and states we can say that all Americans will be better off because of it.

Have a great union weekend.

In solidarity,

Dr. Everett Kelley
AFGE National President

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