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Keeping Work In-House

(This article first appeared in the July/August 2003 issue of The American Postal Worker magazine.)

In a major victory for our union, Arbitrator Carlton J. Snow ruled in late April that Address Management System Specialist positions belong to the APWU bargaining unit.

In his ruling on the AMS Specialist position, Snow wrote that "it is a violation of Article 1.2 of the National Agreement to exclude the position and the disputed work from the bargaining unit."

The long road to this important ruling began in the early 1990s, when the Postal Service established the AMS Specialist position to run the computer-based system for managing address information of postal customers. Before this computer-based position was created, an Address Information Systems Analyst position existed as a non-bargaining unit job, but bargaining unit employees also performed address management work.

In October 1997, the APWU filed a "Unit Clarification Petition," with the National Labor Relations Board, asking that a number of positions be returned to the bargaining unit, and in 1998, we filed a series of national-level grievances. The Postal Service failed to meet with the union or issue a decision in response to the grievances, but the USPS and APWU settled the Unit Clarification case by agreeing to arbitrate them expeditiously. The settlement further stated:

"The parties shall apply the national-level arbitrators' awards which are issued as a result of this settlement agreement as broadly as possible in an effort to resolve other pending EAS grievances raising the same or similar issues or arguments."

Ultimately, the reason this arbitration is so important to the APWU is that it upholds our view that is improper to create non-bargaining unit positions outside the explicit exclusions of Article 1.2 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. New positions that do not meet the test of Article 1.2 exclusions must be assigned to a craft, in accordance with Article 1.5.

An Earlier Ruling

To date, the Postal Service has made little effort to implement Arbitrator Snow's first decision from this series of cases, involving Personnel Assistants. In the earlier ruling, Arbitrator Snow returned almost all personnel work to the bargaining unit, writing:

"The arbitrator received clear and convincing evidence in the current grievance that the disputed duties existed and were placed within the bargaining unit represented by this Union as early as the 1960s. For instance, the 'Personnel Assistant' position of 1968 was the predecessor to the 'Personnel Assistant' position in dispute before the arbitrator.

"'Personnel Assistant' positions of the 1960s were part of the bargaining unit represented by this Union. Nor is there any dispute about the fact that workers in those 'Personnel Assistant' positions continue today to perform purely clerical duties. For example, this is demonstrated by the fact that, despite a 1962 Executive Order excluding personnel employees performing other than purely 'clerical' duties from the bargaining unit, some 'Personnel Assistant' as well as 'Personnel Clerk' positions remained within this bargaining unit and performed a wide range of duties.

"Consequently, it is reasonable to conclude that Management viewed duties performed by 'Personnel Assistants' and 'Personnel Clerks' in the Union after 1962 to be clerical in nature. Otherwise, the positions would have been removed at that time."

We remain optimistic, however, that management will live up to its agreement to apply the current arbitration award as broadly as possible.

Lessons Learned

The APWU has had a long contentious history with the Postal Service over the creation of non-bargaining unit positions to perform work that we believe should be done by APWU-represented employees. Early on, we argued that the creation of these positions violated Article 1.6, which restricts supervisors from performing bargaining unit work. This argument failed in cases where the positions were designated as "outside the bargaining unit," but not supervisory.

If your office has not pursued personnel work ¨ including training, safety and Office of Workers Compensation Program (OWCP) assignments ¨ citing Article 1.2, please do so.

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