A Union Divorce Without Remorse

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 26, 2001 | by Sean Paige

It was a sham from the beginning: a marriage of political convenience between parties that inwardly loathed each other but put the best face forward for the sake of public appearances.

No, this isn't about the Clintons -- at least not directly. It's about a Clinton-era obsession, however: the quest for a new labor-management partnership within the federal government. Codified by Executive Order 12871 in 1993, the partnership was supposed to pave the way toward a reinvention of the way it all works.

According to the new partnership pact struck in the early days of the Clinton administration, federal labor unions were made full and equal partners in agency decision-making in exchange for their acquiescence in workforce reductions, pledges to curtail antimanagement grievances and political support for Clinton/Gore presidential tickets. Senior federal managers also would get something out of it -- more headaches, as nearly every decision they made henceforth would have to be cleared, Soviet-style, by the surly gang of recalcitrants on the workers' watercooler committee.

But the shotgun marriage is officially over, revoked several weeks back by President George W. Bush, and probably not just because his candidacy was vehemently opposed by federal labor unions. Critics, most notably the conservative Heritage Foundation, argued that the new partnership, instead of enhancing government efficiency, bogged down decisionmaking by undermining senior managers and just wasn't working despite intensified White House pressure on federal managers to surrender authority.

Bush, on the same day that he revoked Clinton's executive order, issued another one requiring federal contractors to tell employees of their right to withhold that portion of their dues that funds union political activities with which they disagree. A second executive order prevents government agencies from requiring that their contractors be unionized.

Moving the nation toward a more perfect union is one thing; turning it over to union control is another.