Defend Our Jobs

Undersecretary of the Army Brad Carson

Don’t let DoD Take Away Your Rights

Sign the petition to let Brad Carson know you will defend your job and protect your rights.

The Department of Defense wants to take away Title 5 rights for civilian employees and overhaul how employees are hired, paid, promoted, and managed.

We recently learned about these proposals, but they’re actually not new at all. In fact, many are regurgitated almost verbatim from DoD’s failed National Security Personnel System, which we fought tooth and nail to defeat during the George W. Bush administration.

The Pentagon is calling its plan the Force of the Future, but it’s nothing more than a farce designed to weaken employees’ workplace rights. Under the plan, civilian employees would be transferred from Title 5 of the U.S. Code to Title 10, which primarily covers the military.

While we are still working to understand the implications of such a drastic move, it is clear that this move would give the current Defense secretary and any future secretary a blank check to craft a personnel system that could easily undermine and violate the fundamental principles of our long-established commitment to a merit-based civil service system.

Help us keep this plan in the past where it belongs. We need to fight this plan just as hard as we fought to kill NSPS. To do that, we’ll need to organize more union members.

DoD’s plan would hit non-bargaining unit employees first, but everyone will become a target if we don’t stop this plan in its tracks. Sign the petition to let Brad Carson know you will defend your job and your rights.

Petition by
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McLean, Virginia

To: Undersecretary of the Army Brad Carson
From: [Your Name]

Dear Mr. Secretary:
As a Department of Defense civilian employee represented by the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE), I write to convey my strong objections to the personnel reforms proposed in the Department’s Force of the Future report.
The Department did not give NAGE and other DoD unions adequate time to review the proposals contained in the report, nor were we consulted prior to the report’s creation as per the pre-decisional involvement (PDI) process established through Executive Order 13522. The Department presented the 90-page report to NAGE by way of the DoD Labor-Management Roundtable meeting on August 27, 2015. At the meeting, no one from DoD was present who could answer any of our questions regarding Force of the Future. We were told by DoD officials to review the hefty, nearly-finalized report and respond with comments within two weeks, on September 11, no less. The deadline gave NAGE insufficient time to develop a thorough understanding of the proposals which involves collaborating with legal and legislative departments, coordinating with other DoD unions, and consulting with our union members. This PDI charade became even more apparent once it was understood that some of the proposed Force of the Future reforms would begin to be implemented as early as October of this year.
Furthermore, Force of the Future all but eviscerates the years of work behind New Beginnings, a bipartisan project between labor and management that was mandated by Congress in the FY10 NDAA. For several years, the New Beginnings team has collaborated to create a list of personnel reform proposals, some of which were copied and included in the Force of the Future report. Although DoD may have attempted to incorporate certain New Beginnings proposals, the heart of the report is filled with other reforms that directly attack civilian employees, including but not limited to restrictions on worker’s rights, weakening veterans’ preference, and creating a discriminatory parental leave process, to name a few. The Force of the Future report therefore is redundant, regressive, and wholly insolent of the legislative mandate behind New Beginnings.

For these reasons, I strongly urge DoD to postpone implementing the Force of the Future report until such time as DoD has adequately briefed NAGE and answered our questions through the real PDI, as well as through the National Consultation Rights (NCR) process mandated by Federal law. NAGE further requests a meeting with Secretary of Defense Carter and Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Brad Carson prior to issuance of the Force of the Future report.