HATCH 22

...The average CSRS retirement benefit for 1982 was $1,200 a month...

...Ford and Hoyer, after all, are staunch Democrats and union supporters...

...the bad ones are so high on the seniority you can’t get them...

...there are two or three levels...

...OPEN THE HATCH So the civil service of today, because of the politics of federal worker unions and because of the influence they wield over key members of Congress, is nothing like what Congress envisioned when it passed the Hatch Act...

...Steny Hoyer, a Maryland representative whose district is to federal workers what Claude Pepper’s Miami is to old people, attached a rider to a supplemental appropriations bill to deny OPM the money to finance the changes...

...Convention goers also held a symbolic “funeral” for their relationship with Carter...

...This means they should be prohibited from belonging to unions, who politic and dole out PAC money by proxy...

...Blaylock won, but barely: 109,414 to 107,052...

...In January of 1979, the key labor supporter of civil service reform was issuing a “call to arms:’ urging members to mount a counteroffensive to the Carter administration: “The warlords in the administration, Congress, the Chamber of Commerce, the contractors, and the Right Wing intend to steal your retirement and rape your rights and benefits...

...In return for conceding that reforms were needed in the civil servicethat merit pay was a good idea-Blaylock won the promise of a section in the reform act called Title VII, a collective bargaining agreement that represents the biggest legislative victory for federal workers since 1912...

...Federal workers-who have effectively preserved that ignorance for a long timerealize that when Congress sets up a supplemental plan for new hires, their present, rather lavish, benefits will be scrutinized...

...Hah, hah, FDR must have chuckled to himself later when he handily won reelection to a third term, those chumps just locked thousands of my political appointees into the federal bureaucracy, because, though they’d been hired for political loyalty-loyalty to FDR- the Hatch Act now gave them protection from being fired for political reasons...

...But they also, unlike classified employees, were free to participate in partisan politics...

...Theirs were “merit” jobs, which meant they had to pass a civil service exam to be hired...

...That pensions cost the federal government 29.5 percent of payroll while the average pension plan costs private-sector employees only 6.4 percent of payroll-or only 14.7 percent when you count what private employers kick in for matching Social Security funds...

...Political force...

...Blaylock was also the first federal worker union leader to understand what gains could be made by compromise...

...AFGE Occupies Capitol Hill:’ read their flier, “Be There With Your Troops...

...And that’s why the same Ken Blaylock who privately says he believes in merit pay (“You get a few slackers in the federal workforce, sure you do...

...After all, one of the longest and loudest cries of their unions has been to “unHatch” civil servants...

...Teresa Riordun is on the stuff of The Washington Monthly...

...Why not give The Washington Monthly for Christmas this year...

...Non-classified employees didn’t...

...Not only that, but federal employees with 30 years’ experience can retire at age 55...

...Mathias hails from Maryland, a state-surprise, surprise-that’s right up there with Virginia and Alaska in its high concentration of federal workers...

...People doing a good job for the union, you look them in the eye and tell them they don’t have a job...

...Blaylock’s strategy and rhetoric turned aboutface soon after the 1978 convention...

...Federal workers got Russell Long to introduce an amendment that would have postponed putting new federal employees under Social Security until after Congress had established a new supplemental retirement fund...

...Had the Reagan administration attempted such courageous lies, editorial pages across the nation would have issued immediate reprimands...

...Instead, Blaylock‘s fellow union leaders left him standing alone in his support of the reform act-and of Carter...

...political consideration did not enterl’ But he also said it was wrong to limit the political activity of federal workers who were not protected by procedural safeguards...

...CSRA was a brokered fiasco...

...But the bitterness among AFGE members manifested itself in places other than the voting polls...

...They could be hired and fired for job performance as well as political loyalty...

...Blaylock conceded in private to a union president this January that it was wrong to say that “the lower grades [in the civil service] are not getting the fruit of the loom...

...He said that we should “rightly and properly limit political activity of [federal workers] whose choice and retention...

...When the group’s preliminary proposals were leaked to the press around Thanksgiving last year, FAIR, a coalition of federal worker organizations, launched an advertising counter-offensive that forced the commission to beat a hasty retreat...

...And what will John and Jane Public find when Congress makes its comparison studies...

...The fact that only people hired after January 1, 1984-not those currently in the civil service-would be covered, and that they were assured a supplemental pension plan, was not enough...

...The law prediction, Sadler said, “encouraged Carter to go for 9.1 percent instead of 13.5 percent...

...And then, tens of millions of Social Security recipients-not just 2.7 million federal employees-would have been writing angry letters to Washington...

...Now wait a minute, those of you who took Citizenship back in eighth grade are probably saying, aren’t federal workers prohibited from politicking...

...But the establishment press didn’t raise an eyebrow at these dubious claims-even though the CSRS fund is in about as much danger of drying up as Lake Michigan...

...They come from states with two of the highest concentrations of federal workers-Alaska and Virginia...

...And their ideological empathy for federal workers is probably reinforced by the generous contributions that public sector union PACs have dropped into their campaign funds-last year that meant $53,231 for Hoyer and $36,025 for Ford...

...Before Blaylock became president of AFGE in 1976, federal worker organizations lobbied for their individual causes without much concern for the federal worker community as a whole...

...Only 0.5 percent of your constituency may be Jewish, but if you vote anti-Israeli, you’ll hear from every one of them-or at least you’ll think you’ve heard from all of them:’ DEVINE INTERVENTION Federal workers haven’t limited their political activity to pension plans...

...NFFE gave gory warnings like “Mandatory Social Security Coverage for Federal Employees: Band-Aid for Some, or Execution for All...

...Simple...

...Federal workers will tell you that Devine, with his aggressive style and threatening press releases, has done for federal unions what James Watt has done for membership at the Sierra Club-given them a bogeyman to rail against...

...By the time it announced its final recommendations in January, the commission proposed that only new-hires be included in Social Security-a minimal plan, but one that would earn $12 billion within seven years from a pool of workers who wouldn’t be eligible to receive benefits for another 30 years...

...Despite repeated displays of militant political pressure from federal workers, the proposal to induct feds into Social Security finally passed this spring as part of the whole Social Security reform act because Congress realized that if any part of the fragile package had been pulled out, the whole proposal would have come apart...

...Marchers in the half-mile-long procession carried signs with slogans like “Amy, Your Daddy Is A Liar...

...Ah hah, FDR’s foes must have thought triumphantly at the time the act passed, we’ve just emasculated FDR’s political machine...

...Measures to repeal the Hatch Act have been introduced in every session of Congress since 1940, largely because many federal workers want their full political privileges back...

...So, when the National Commission on Social Security Reform looked around last year for ways to buoy the floundering Social Security system, its eyes naturally came to rest on the civil service...

...The vote reflected membership bitterness over Blaylock’s backing of the reform act: “Everybody was just sure that somewhere in that damn law was a sentence that says federal workers could be fired without due process:’ Blaylock says...

...But for a more powerful example of how effective the federal worker lobby has been on merit pay, let’s trot over to the Senate side of the Capitol...

...And Bill Ford, chairman of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, got cracking on his own version of merit pay, which sounded suspiciously like Son of CSRA...

...By this time Stevens had offered“ unions the right to negotiate terms of job standards, financial incentives, and RIF rules to be used in the bill’s three-year “test program” in which the number of workers under pay-forperformance has been reduced to one-tenth of Devine’s original proposal-from 1.4 million to 150,000...

...Although federal workers are prohibited from organizing fellow workers for political causes or candidates, unions and lobbying associations aren’t prohibited from doing it for them...

...Civil Service reform taught Blaylock a lesson that almost cost him the presidencg’ says an official from another union...

...Federal workers should indeed, if they so choose, have the right to participate fully in politics...

...Perhaps it’s time to recognize the Hatch Act for what it was-a congressional revolt against the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt-and what it wasn’tpositive reform...

...What the unions got out of the 1978 reforms was the right to bargain over virtually any change in working conditions, ” Leonard Reed, a contributing editor of this magazine, pointed out in Harper’s last November, “. . . the management of a military installation, when making temporary out-of-town assignments, now has to choose the person assigned on the basis of seniority...

...The lesson of the 1978 convention was not lost on Blaylock...

...C I VI LIZ ED S ERV I CE The purpose of the Hatch Act (named for Carl from New Mexico, not Orrin from Utah) was indeed to depoliticize the civil service...

...Federal workers screamed...

...It instituted a narrow and poorly thought-out merit pay program that applied to about 120,000 middle managers...

...Stevens, under heavy pressure from the Reagan administration-after all, he is second ranking Republican in the Senate as well as chairman of the Governmental Affairs Post Office and Civil Service subcommittee-introduced a merit pay bill that was somewhat along the lines of OPM’s original proposal...

...The American Postal Workers Union held a teleconference-a two-hour lobbying training seminar via communications satellite that attracted more than 9,000 members at 47 sites in 35 states (diplomacy apparently wasn’t on the agenda-the federal workers who sieged O’Neill’s office were from the APWU...

...But Blaylock’s rhetoric became increasingly hard-line-hard-line enough to sway many of Sadler’s former supporters by the time the 1982 election came around...

...The Hatch Act may have taken the politics out of the civil service, but it didn’t take civil servants out of politics...

...So, was everybody happy...

...Professional union staffers and lobbyists, who aren’t subject to the Hatch Act, can solicit campaign contributions from federal workers, sponsor political meetings, and organize grassroots lobbying by telling federal workers what congressmen to send letters to, to call, to vote for...

...At my union and at other unions:’ says the same official, “the gut reaction is militancy...

...An employee’s contributions are paid back to him within a year and a half after he retires...

...Blaylock, who realized the value of coalition, organized the federal worker lobby during the 1976 presidential election to help elect Jimmy Carter...

...So Stevens, who’s up for reelection back in Alaska next year, invited union leaders to help draft different pay-for-performance legislation that they might be happier with...

...the average Social Security benefit was a little over $400...

...When you consider how long they managed to stay such a fair proposal-such a minimal proposal-you begin to realize what a formidable political force they are...

...government, rather), but this “fund” is for the most part an accounting procedure that reflects internal transactions of the government...

...Given the control Ford wields over the committee, it would have come up with a supplemental retirement fund around the same time Jake Garn gets around to introducing a bill to cut Senate pay in half...

...But those who want to “electioneer” shouldn’t be allowed to crawl under the protective umbrella of job security provisions when they act as lobbyists when the question of pay-forperformance rolls across the horizon...

...Seeking labor’s support for civil service reform, Carter approached George Meany, who told him, “If you want to get right with the AFLCIO, first you’d better get right with Ken Blaylock...

...They should not have the right to lobby-in other words, to act as politicians-unless they are willing to run the same risks the politicians do by putting their careers on the line...

...But just as important as the pressure on Blaylock to placate his union’s worst members was the pressure to play follow the leader...

...He whipped Sadler 120,529 to 48,187...

...It’s like the Israeli lobbg’ says a House Post Office and Civil Service Commitee staffer...

...Going back to the system of the pre-Hatch Act years, which distinguished between political and nonpolitical federal workers, would be the quickest route to true civil service ‘‘reform...

...The Hatch Act didn’t eliminate political activity on the part of federal workers, it just changed the form of it...

...One AFGE local alone, Warner Robins 987, delivered 60,000 postcards to Georgia’s senators and two of its representatives...

...Civil servants, because Congress created a pension plan for them two decades before it enacted a pension plan for the nation, have never paid into Social Security...

...But had such a program not been on the statutes when Reagan, whose first act as president was to implement reductions in force, rode into town, you can be sure he would have seriously considered revoking the executive order recognizing limited federal worker bargaining power...

...That’s the roughest thing I’ve ever done...

...The National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) staged a lobbying week in February...

...We took a few lessons from the New Right:’ says Blaylock in commenting on how AFGE’s lobbying techniques have changed in the past few years...

...That’s tough...

...That’s why, on the issue of reductions in force (RIFs) and pay comparability, Blaylock-like many good federal employees, unfortunatelythinks one thing and says another...

...By mid-July, Devine realized the original proposal was going nowhere and issued revised rules to placate Stevens’s subcommittee...

...UNION DO’S The key to understanding the irrational obstinancy of federal workers on issues such as merit pay and Social Security is to understand the inner political dynamics of their unions...

...So federal workers-their unions, ratherlaunched a frontal political attack, mobilizing their members with frightening slogans in newspaper and TV ads and union publications warning that this limited proposal threatened their pensions...

...Blaylock realized he needed to do what the competition was doing...

...More important, it changed the motivation behind it-from ideological conviction to self-interest...

...You see, back then the civil service was divided into “classified” and “non-classified!’ Classified workers already enjoyed considerable job protection from political manipulation by superiors...

...But they get three times the amount Social Security recipients get in pensions...

...What they won’t tell you is that, unlike Watt, Devine is proposing some fair and reasonable measures...

...In 1980, Blaylock ran another close reelection race, even though he had recanted his support for Carter and was running against the administration...

...Even the rearrangement of desks-that central activity of bureaucratic life-can now be the subject of union-management bickering...

...And because of the minimum benefit provision in Social Security (those who make the lowest average contributions are assumed to need more money) some government retirees were receiving generous checks though they paid into Social Security only a short while...

...One of the first legislative initiatives Carter attempted as president was to establish a more flexible-a more accountable-bureaucracy...

...The act passed in 1939, mostly because the Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress wanted to stymie the growing federal workforce’s potential support of Franklin D. Roosevelt for a third term...

...The boisterous entourage eventually departed after some cajoling from a legislative assistant and nudging from the Capitol Hill police, but the demonstrators had made their point clear: they wanted no part of Social Security...

...The first thing he learned, it seems, is that in the world of federal employees if you don’t want to go back to being a plumber in Alabama, you have to keep your moderate opinions to yourself and espouse views sufficiently strident to appeal to the lowest common denominator of your union...

...Now he’s certainly more publicly strident...

...It’s not ideology or even PAC contributionsit’s the makeup of their constituencies...

...So after the reform act passed was Ken Blaylock carried off his feet amid cheers from his fellow workers for such astute political maneuvering...

...The Hatch Act, in essence, incorporated an already existing civil service political neutrality rule into law and extended it to non-classified workers...

...Now that’s an idea that should delight most federal workers...

...Thousands of federal workers from the American Federation of Government Employees descended on the Hill in early March for a four-day lobbying campaign...

...This means the cost of the rest of the pension payments-about 80 percent of total costs-are footed by the taxpayer...

...Blaylock, as the only federal worker representative to sit on the AFLCIO’s board, was the key to negotiations on the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978...

...by Teresa Riordan Last March, about 100 federal workers marched into the Rayburn House Office Building, halted in front of Speaker Thomas O’Neill’s congressional office, and chanted “We want Tip, we want Tip:’ so loudly that neighboring staffs had to close their doors to shut out the commotion...

...At the AFGE national convention in Chicago that summer of 1978, incumbent Blaylock ran the closest presidential election the union has ever seen...

...Blaylock, suffering from residual resentment over the reform act, was still being assailed for being too soft...

...Teddy Roosevelt, who served as civil service commissioner under two administrations before he became president, had the right idea...

...While the Publics might think it fair to provide feds a pension plan-after all, about 45 percent of private-sector employees get some kind of pension from their employer on top of Social Security-they might not be too keen on footing the tax bill for one that pays twice what they can expect from their company when they retire...

...And, in this age of direct mail and Ma Bell, both of which have made grassroots lobbying a powerful force, protected federal workers also should be prohibited from writing and calling congressmen about issues concerning their employment-i.e., merit pay and retirement benefits...

...It was so ineffective that fewer tenured federal workers were fired for incompetence in 1980, two years after the reform act was passed, than were fired in the pre-reform year of 1976, when the discharge rate was one-seventh of 1 percent...

...And those federal workers who didn’t make it to Washington or to the teleconference, it seems, wrote their congressmen...

...There’s no doubt that when I first came into town I didn’t understand a lot of things:’ says Blaylock...

...where the federal pay on a nationwide basis, really, in a lot of areas is higher than that same skill level in the private sectorl’ Also, in private, Blaylock has talked about how rotten a seniority system, as opposed to a merit system, can be, especially during reductions in force, which AFGE had to undergo just as the federal government did: “I’m not going to go through another RIF of sending people out the dooc’ he said...

...Blaylock may have been the first to realize the advantage of compromise, but he was the last to realize its consequences...

...Federal workers and their congressional allies, intent on keeping things the way they were, scurried to prevent Donald Devine, head of OPM, from implementing his merit pay plan...

...Carl Sadler, Blaylock’s main contender for the presidency, attacked the AFGE president for publicly predicting that the federal employee pay raise for October would be 9.1 percent...

...Just take a look at the issue of merit pay, where members of Congress, still black and blue from lobbying punches delivered during the Social Security fight, aren’t eager to raise the bureaucratic ire again...

...Sounds reasonable, huh...

...Why did federal workers choose to unabashedly stonewall, vehemently opposing any kind of Social Security coverage, on an issue so in the national interest, rather than, say, concentrate on securing a solid supplemental plan for new-hires...

...A lot of senators thought so too, until they remembered who chairs the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee: William Ford, Mr...

...Federal workers ostensibly lost on the Social Security issue, but only because, as one congressional staffer says, “It was them against the country...

...But worst was the betrayal by his own union: “My opponents internally were trying to scare the hell out of my members:’ Blaylock recalls...

...Federal employee unions are one of the best organized, most active lobbies going...

...Federal Worker himself...

...Logic, however, didn’t carry the commission far in the quest to correct the omission of federal workers from Social Security...

...In the late thirties the non-classified payroll became swollen with New Deal public works employees who felt fiercely indebted to FDR for their jobs-jobs given to them n o s because they had passed a civil service exam but 1 because they had no other way to earn money during the Depression...

...The words “Hatch Act” are even probably vaguely stirring in the memories of those of you who got an A in the class...

...when I was in the shop I resented a slacker because I had to pick up his work”) is the same Ken Blaylock who’s pushing so hard to stalemate merit pay with a bill that would in effect shelve it for another three years...

...Too late...

...Good question...

...APWU members were told Social Security would leave “no money to pay the pensions of current workers when they retire:’ FAIR dropped $6 million in six weeks on another advertising blitz in early spring, saying that Social Security coverage would “lead to the bankruptcy of the federal retirement system:’ Scary predictions, but oh, so untrue...

...To collect the relatively paltrq benefits in full from Social Security, one has tc wait until age 65...

...Title VI1 merely put into law an expanded version of a labor-management relations program for nonpostal federal workers which had existed previously under executive order since John F. Kennedy...

...And scare they did...

...On the other hand, those who want to hold on to their job security should be able to opt for protection but they shouldn’t be permitted to storm the Capitol at the first move Congress makes to cap their COLA...

...But over in the Senate chamber, it’s not just the Fords and the Hoyers you’ll find rooting for federal workersit’s Republicans like Ted Stevens and John Warner and Paul Trible who are working overtime to keep the Reagan administration from implementing a merit pay plan...

...Not federal workers, even though this was the weakest such proposal made in the previous seven years during which time the idea had been frequently kicked around the Hill but theretofore stayed by their political pressure...

...Several AFGE units voted soon after to disaffiliate and join another federal worker union, because of Blaylock’s support for civil service reform...

...Certainly federal workers pay 7 percent of their salary to CSRS (to the U.S...

...Blaylock was rebuffed at the convention on key issues such as a dues increase and publicly humiliated when delegates fired by voice vote his closest confidant and adviser and chief architect of AFGE’s strategy on civil service reform, Leo M. Pellerzi, who accused Blaylock’s opponents of “pandering to the union’s malcontentsl’ Morris Udall, the convention’s keynote speaker, was almost booed off stage when he tried to praise Blaylock...

...To stall for enough time to implement its own program, Congress did indeed block funding for OPM’s proposal, which brings us to another telling aside: It was a non-germane amendment to a Transportation appropriations bill, not Steny Hoyer’s rider in the House, that was attached by yet another Republican senator-Charles Mathias-which ultimately stalled OPM...

...The answer lies in the size of federal pension checks, which the public has always known to be generous, but has never realized how generous, mostly because the Social Security factor has prevented an easy parallel comparison...

...Instead, government employees-the largest workforce in Americapay about the same percentage of their paychecks into something called the Civil Service Retirement System as the rest of America pays into Social Security...

...But the most compelling reason for making federal employees pay into Social Security was that, because many of them paid into Social Security during stints in the private sector before or after their civil service tenure, about 70 percent of federal retirees were getting some type of Social Security pension on top of their monthly CSRS check...

...And the best way to do that is to observe the largest federal worker union-the American Federation of Government Employees-and its president, Kenneth Blaylock...

...Why are Stevens, the Senate majority whip, Warner, whose AFL-CIO rating for 1981 was five on a scale of 100, and Trible, who co-chaired Reagan’s presidential campaign in Virginia, bucking the administration’s merit pay plans and going to bat for federal workers...

...The commission members, logical creatures that they were, looked at the facts and concluded that federal workers (while, of course, being assured a supplemental pension plan as well) should help shore up the sinking Ship Social Security...

...In late March the Office of Personnel Management, which used to be called the Civil Service Commission, announced a new performancebased pay and retention program for federal workers to be implemented administrativelywithout approval of Congress-under authority granted OPM under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, an act whose purpose was to make standards for hiring and firing in the civil service based more on merit rather than seniority...