Posted on: Sunday, May 1, 2005

EDITORIAL
Don't tamper with civil service system

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Americans were asked to sacrifice or suspend accustomed liberties and rights in the interest of national security.

And for the most part people agreed. The war on terror called for new rules.

But critics quickly pointed out that the turmoil following 9/11 was also used as an excuse or cover to advance proposals that had found little favor until then. This ranged from sweeping changes to airline security procedures to new systems to monitor what books and magazines one checked out from the local library.

Into this post-9/11 environment now falls a radical proposal to change — supporters say modernize — the civil service system governing more than 700,000 Defense Department workers around the world.

This is no small matter to the 16,000 largely unionized Department of Defense workers in Hawai'i.

The changes are based on a plan already approved by Congress. It moves toward a pay-for-performance system and would grant administrators greater flexibility to respond swiftly to changing conditions in the new post-9/11 world.

So far, so good. But many, including Hawai'i Sen. Daniel Akaka, fear the Department of Defense is moving too swiftly to dismantle basic civil service protections as well as its underlying collective bargaining system.

Ulterior motives

It appears the current administration is flying the flag of the war on terrorism to dismantle long-standing and hard-fought union rights for government workers. No one argues that civil service reform is not needed; the concern is that this plan is a wholesale attack on worker rights under false pretenses.

John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, clearly has an ax to grind in this dispute. But his words at a mid-April Senate hearing on the proposals are chilling.

"The approach the DOD has taken thus far ... has been profoundly demoralizing for its civilian employees," Gage told the committee.

"These dedicated and patriotic Americans are extremely unsettled by the harsh prospects set forth in the proposed regulations — because they are not fooled by words like 'modern,' 'flexible' and 'market-based,' " he said.

That might be dismissed as union rhetoric, but it was echoed by many of the senators who voted for the original idea. They argued that the plan, in its draft form, would take almost all workplace issues out of the arena of collective bargaining and would put into place harsh and inflexible discipline systems.

"The (National Security Personnel System) effectively eliminates collective bargaining by eliminating bargaining over approximately 75 percent of current bargaining issues," Akaka said.

Said his colleague, Sen. Ted Kennedy: "The changes being made today are the most sweeping changes in the personnel system ever. And I support modernization, but it can and must be done without gutting vital workers' rights and protections."

The response from Defense Department officials at the hearings was effectively that they have no intention of eliminating collective bargaining or civil service protections and that specifics of the changes are still subject to consultation with unions and workers.

Driving rationale

Yet it was obvious they intend to plough ahead with these changes, with national security as the driving rationale.

"We have to be quicker and more agile and more flexible because, frankly, that's the kind of threat we face today," said Navy Secretary Gordon England. "We no longer have the long timelines. We have to be very, very responsive. We have to be able to recruit and retain the very best people in the workforce for the federal government."

That's hard to argue with. But already, senators are complaining that under the language of the new law, the Defense Department has begun to favor political appointees over civil service administrators at pay-raise time.

Any system, including the federal civil service system, can stand a dose of reform and modernization. And there's no question that the post-9/11 era calls for new approaches and new ways of doing things.

But every change must stand on its merits. Our post-9/11 concerns should not be used as an excuse to advance a political agenda that has nothing to do with the war on terror.

At a minimum, any changes to today's system must be made at the same place they were created in the first place: over the bargaining table.