April 2024 President’s Message
Christie Saunders, NTEU Chapter 224 President
Brothers and Sisters,
On February 27, 2024, I filed a comprehensive institutional grievance on the statistical validity of DWPI/SAAPI/NHCPI and the Agency’s ongoing, blatant violation of our AWT Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs). The alleged violations include: 5 U.S.C. 7116; 5 U.S.C. 4302(c)(1); 5 CFR 430; NTEU-SSA 2019 National Agreement as amended in November 2022; Article 5, Section 1(A); Article 21, Sections 4(C), 5(A)(2)(b) and (c), 5(B)(3), and 5(G)(1) and (2); 2019 Implementation of the Auxiliary Workload Tool MOU; 2021 Performance Indices for Decision Writing MOU; SSA PPM S430_1, Section 5.11.3.3 Consideration of Numeric Data and Quality Measures, and Section 5.12 Ratings for Individual Performance Elements; and any other relevant contract provision, law, rule, regulation, or policy.
The grievance outlines issues with the Agency’s attempt to create a standardized metric to measure non-standardized work. It references the initial arbitration decision from the Federal Services Impasse Panel from 2015, in which the FSIP Chairman warned the Agency about the metric. The warnings included: a possible disparate impact; measuring performance when the work performed is dependent on the work of others, such as ALJs; factors beyond our control, such as voluminous records, ALJ instructions, and varying levels of scrutiny by Federal District Courts; and management’s failure to upload factors beyond our control emails to the e7B file.
The grievance argues that management acknowledged statistical validity issues related to “baked-in” factors when they created the AWT to account for non-uniform tasks, such as meetings, trainings, computer issues, mentoring, and ALJ advisement. In other words, if everything was “baked-in” as alleged, we would not need to account for other tasks in the AWT. The grievance also challenged the validity by questioning whether a means absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 12 is acceptable when the Agency has proposed removal and/or removed employees when their DWPI/SAAPI/NHCPI drops ever so slightly below 90.
The grievance challenges the Agency on its failure to provide an explanation to management and employees of how factors beyond our control are considered or converted to a numeric metric consistent with DWPI/SAAPI/NHCPI. It also admonishes the Agency for its knowing and willful violation of the contract, MOUs, its own PPM, and the law. Moreover, it contains meeting notes and management statements showing a total disregard for use of the AWT. Members can access a copy of the grievance by logging into the members only section of the Chapter's website here.
AFGE also filed an institutional grievance on the Agency’s restricted use of the AWT.
The Agency reached out to discuss a possible mediation. I will keep you posted on any developments in this matter. If you have questions or comments, please send them to our intake committee at intake@nteuchapter224.org.
In solidarity-
Christie Saunders, NTEU Chapter 224 President
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