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The Health and Human Services Department has decided to involve employee unions in key workforce management decisions - seven years after President Clinton ordered all agencies to do so.

In an April 4 memorandum to the heads of HHS agencies, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala and Deputy Secretary Kevin Thurm said managers should involve union representatives in decisions regarding numbers, types and grades of employees, work projects, tours of duty and the technology, methods and means of performing work.

This move "will have a series of positive results," Shalala and Thurm said. "The partnership relationship between union and management will be strengthened; decisions will be better because we will have the benefit of the advice, expertise and insights of employees and their union representatives on a broader range of issues earlier in the decision making process; [and] decisions made in partnership will be implemented more expeditiously because pre-decisional involvement of unions will reduce or eliminate the need to bargain on the impact and implementation of decisions made."

Under the HHS plan, managers will discuss workforce issues with labor representatives and reach agreements before changes are made in the workplace. If management and union officials are unable to reach agreement on a particular issue, the dispute would be resolved by the HHS Union-Management Partnership Council, which includes representatives of management and labor from across the department.

In 1993, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12871, which called upon federal managers to bargain with unions over such workforce issues. In many agencies, managers have resisted the order, saying that decisions about the makeup of the workforce and the structure of the workplace belong in the hands of management.

Both the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia have ruled that the executive order does not legally bind managers to bargain over the issues listed in Section 7106(b)(1) of federal labor relations law (often referred to as (b)(1) or permissive issues).

But in October, President Clinton issued a memorandum asking agencies to submit reports to the Office of Management and Budget describing their efforts to comply with the order and to involve unions more in workplace decisions. Those reports were due to OMB last Friday.

Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said the HHS decision to include labor representatives in more decisions about the workforce is "a welcome and significant advance" in federal labor-management relations.