Federal Daily - January 12, 2010

Push Is on For Bargaining Rights at TSA

Two unions representing Transportation Security Administration employees — and courting new members — have hit the ground running in 2010 to demonstrate the solidarity of their Transportation Security Officer base, and to ramp up their pursuit of full collective bargaining rights for TSOs.

While TSOs currently do not have the right to collective bargaining, the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union currently man dozens of locals that represent TSO members in courts and in regulatory venues such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

AFGE, which has more than 12,000 TSA members in 36 locals around the country, was slated to convene a solidarity event at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport Monday to celebrate the addition of its newest TSA local, with Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., in attendence.

And NTEU, in a letter to President Obama last week, asked that any review of the Christmas airline bombing attempt—which put TSA and other federal security agencies in the spotlight—also include a full review of the actions the union says are required at TSA.

In addition to calling for the immediate confirmation of TSA administrator nominee Erroll Southers, NTEU President Colleen Kelley also asked for a review of TSO pay and training, and requested that the administration take a close look at the consistency of TSA management policies across the country. NTEU has about two dozen chapters representing TSOs at about 40 airports around the United States.

“TSA employees have a lot of ideas about how to improve the workplace and enhance security practices that are not being tapped into,” Kelley wrote. “It would be my hope that by working together we would be able to develop a system that would encourage, recognize and reward employees for such contributions.”

To see more, go to: http://dhs.nteu.org/tsa/documents/obamaletter.pdf.

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DoD Launches Overseas Voting Assistance Training Initiative

DoD has launched a voters assistance initiative designed to help an estimated 6 million uniformed and overseas citizens cast absentee ballots in federal elections back home.

DoD’s Federal Voting Assistance Program on Jan. 7 kicked off a training program for voting assistance officers at military bases worldwide in the new year. DoD and State Department directives require a voting assistance officer at the unit level and at every embassy and consulate to aid absentee voting.

Teams of employees will be sent to overseas sites to train voting assistant officers in the changes that have been made to help curb the disenfranchisement of overseas voters, especially servicemembers. Much of the change centers around more frequent use of post card applications to ensure current registration.

“Our goal is to bring the military and overseas citizen absentee voting success rate to that of the general public,” said Carey. “Registration and ballot request, by using the federal postcard application, is critical to our citizens.”

Military and overseas voters should only use the Federal Post Card Application (available from voting assistance officers or www.FVAP.gov) and not state registration and absentee ballot application forms, DoD said.

The FPCA provides federal rights and guarantees that the state forms do not, DoD said. Voting assistance officers should provide a federal postcard application to all military personnel by Jan. 15, DoD said.

Military voters should submit a new federal postcard application each year and every time they move, deploy or redeploy overseas, according to the department. And overseas civilian voters should submit an application before every federal election, DoD said.

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