Afge Settlement Agreement

Tom Temin: Okay, and before I go into some of those details, I mentioned about a quarter of a million, I think there are 270,000 employees on the National Council goes to AFGE. Is there an agreement for everyone in the Council? Ibidun Roberts: Of course, and we just talked about it, Tom, but the official time even with the executives, and obviously we do not agree with the legality, the law requires the VA and the union to agree on what will be in the official time. We do not think it can be determined unilaterally. But even with that, the VA has so many factors that require the union to occupy more than one hour per bargaining unit. Here, too, we have just mentioned the Accountability Act, no other authority deals with the same law. This association cannot therefore be treated like others if we are faced with this unique law which reduces the time of these serious actions, it in turn includes expulsions. Under Minister Shulkin, he also limited the amount of settlements that could emerge from these actions. If a colony demanded more than $5,000, it had to be more favorable. And what we`ve seen is that the VA is not so open to business resolution. So there will be more files moving forward, which means we will take more time. So we have a few unique factors that would take us more formal time than some other unions would, some other non-VA unions would. And I think history shows that we are not looking for more time than we need. Our current contract gives us 4.25 hours per rate unit employee, OPM report shows that we use about 3.7 hours.

So we don`t pack on time, we use what we need, and the factors of the liability law, not settling cases – actually require that we need more time rather than less. Ibidun Roberts: Oh yes. The VA is therefore seeking a ten-year contract. We are looking for the traditional three-year contract. There are many reasons for this. One of them is that other unions can challenge our certification after three years, but changes are happening as well. And if these changes happen, we want to be able to open the agreements and accept those changes. And this is especially true for the VA, which has had a number of changes. For example, the Accountability Act is an important change that we want to include in the agreement.

Another is President Trump`s executive orders, if we had a 10-year agreement, we would not be able to get changes, like the ones I just mentioned. A shorter term is better than a 10-year term. Tom Temin: And the executive orders of the Trump administration cover a lot of territories, and what can we reasonably expect from an answer, would you want to see in an agreement in terms of official time and all the other provisions? The agency and the union signed the terms of a new regulation on Thursday, AFGE said. Under these conditions, the two sides will resume negotiations for a new contract within the next 30 days. The AfGE also agreed to abandon unfair labour practices and other complaints it had filed in recent months.