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USPS Still Ignoring Orders on EAS Assignments
(This article first appeared in the September/October 2008 issue of The American Postal Worker magazine.)
There is a long history of the AWU challenging management’s practice of assigning bargaining-unit work to Executive and Administrative Salary (EAS) employees, and of the Postal Service balking at efforts to resolve the issue. After several years, the APWU sought relief and, in 1999, we finally achieved an NLRB settlement on a series of cases.
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The settlement indicated that the union’s grievances intended to broadly encompass disputes over whether the positions belong in the bargaining unit or whether the positions contain duties that should be assigned to the bargaining unit. It also stipulated that the parties would apply national-level arbitration awards that were issued as a result of the settlement agreement as broadly as possible in an effort to resolve other pending EAS grievances raising the same or similar issues or arguments.
The nine-year-old “settlement,” however, is still anything but settled: We have an agreement, but we don’t seem to have management’s acceptance of “final and binding” as meaning anything of the sort. The Postal Service not only has gone back to the NLRB, which has jurisdiction over the positions in the bargaining unit, it has ignored arbitration awards about address-information duties.
So, in the culmination of a long fight over just who address-information work belongs to, we will be going to an appeals court this October to once again present our case — the arbitrator’s decision — that the Address Management System work belongs to the APWU bargaining unit. We are no longer asking to be given the positions in question — just the work.
After all, it’s “our work.”
Decade-Old Exclusions
Each of the grievance settlements contained language indicating that none of the positions in dispute was excluded under Article 1.2 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which gives the union representational rights over bargaining-unit employees.
As a remedy, each of the positions in dispute was to be assigned to the appropriate craft unit under Article 1.5 or, in the alternative, bargaining unit assignments were to be created until the requirements of Article 7.2 were met. It is clear in these cases that the union sought both the position description and the work. It’s also clear from Arbitrator Carlton J. Snow’s decision — four years later — on many of the same issues that we were to be given both the job description and the work.
The problem is that the Postal Service is ignoring the arbitration awards and forcing us to take the matter to court. To try to streamline what could be an endless court fight, we are dropping our quest to be given the job description: We just want to get the EAS employees off our work.
In his 2003 ruling, Arbitrator Snow said that the position could be outside the craft if used in the legal sense of “confidential” duties. But he noted that the “lion share” of the duties should be in the Clerk Craft.
Snow also concluded that the “Address Management System Specialist” position is a part of the APWU bargaining unit; that it is a violation of Article 1.2 of the National Agreement to exclude the position, and that the disputed work from the bargaining unit.
In making his final and binding decision, Arbitrator Snow, who passed away in late 2004, declared that the AMS Specialist position does not call for workers to perform duties that qualify as exclusions set forth in the contract.
“Accordingly, it is reasonable to conclude that the parties intended the work and the position to be in the bargaining unit,” Snow wrote. In comparing the duties of the AMS Specialist and the General Clerk position, the arbitrator noted that “the relevant position descriptions merely confirm a conclusion that the disputed work is similar to that performed within the bargaining unit and has not been excluded by contract from the appropriate unit.”
Snow added: “Evidence submitted to the arbitrator established that, in the past, work of AMS Specialists has been performed by both bargaining unit and non-bargaining unit employees. When management created the AMS Specialist position and assigned the work outside the bargaining unit, the American Postal Workers Union received no adequate opportunity to object to the employer’s organizational design.”
The arbitrator said that the union acted in a timely fashion: “On learning of management’s decision to assign the work outside the bargaining unit, the Union not only did not acquiesce but objected to the placement and file grievance to challenge the Employer’s decision… The union in 1992 filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the NLRB the challenged the assignment of allegedly bargaining unit work to non-bargaining unit employees.”
I guess we should all forget that honorable individuals signed a series of National Agreements that acknowledge that arbitration is final and binding; we should forget that honorable individuals signed the 1999 NLRB settlement agreement. Because the decisions did not go their way, Postal Service managers are refusing to implement the order.
We will be back in court this October fighting the Chamber of Commerce attorneys — excuse me, the U.S. attorneys — as we “argue” that Arbitrator Snow did in fact give the AMS work to the APWU bargaining unit.
