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Washington, D.C.—A new personnel system in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can succeed if it is built on the twin pillars of fairness and credibility with employees, the leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees told a key congressional subcommittee today.

The best way to accomplish that, said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), is to incorporate as fundamental elements of a DHS system “a number of basic federal employee protections,” especially in rules governing labor relations, adverse actions, appeals and performance management.

Recognizing that DHS has a legitimate need to address national security matters, NTEU nonetheless believes that this need can and must be balanced against the statutory guarantee of collective bargaining rights for employees, Kelley told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Civil Service and Agency Organizations. Any system that lacks fundamental elements of employee protections, Kelley said, “will not satisfy the requirements of the Act (establishing DHS) and will not be credible to employees.”

Her House testimony came a week after the DHS Senior Review Committee (SRC), of which she is a member, examined and discussed a broad range of proposals aimed at developing a human resource management system at DHS. The SRC report on its discussions likely will go to DHS Secretary Tom Ridge and Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Kay Coles James later this week. Ridge and James will make the final determination.

President Kelley stressed the inclusion of fundamental components of civil service law concerning the scope of bargaining and a meaningful bargaining process that goes beyond mere ‘consultation’ between the agency and employee representatives.

Beyond that, she said, a successful and credible personnel system requires access to some type of independent forum to resolve labor relations disputes, and failure to include such a mechanism would be at odds with the express call in DHS implementing legislation for the preservation of employees’ collective bargaining rights.

What’s more, Kelley emphasized, a successful personnel system in DHS, as elsewhere in the workplace, is “greatly-aided” by meaningful pre-decisional employee involvement.

In addition, she called in her testimony for changes in the labor relations process to make it more streamlined; and she stressed the importance to both the agency and its employees of putting in place an adverse action and appeals process “that treats employees fairly and ensures that their due process rights are protected,” as they are under current civil service laws.

“Employees must be given reasonable notice and an opportunity to make a meaningful reply before disciplinary action is taken against them,” she said. “Employees must be able to appeal agency actions to an independent adjudicator whose decisions are subject to judicial review—and agencies should bear the burden of proving just cause for actions taken against employees,” she added.

On pay, the NTEU leader underscored the critical importance of having in place a performance management system that is credible, as well as being perceived as fair and supported by employees, particularly in any pay-for-performance environment. Linking pay and performance in any system in which supervisors are viewed by employees as unwilling or unable to effectively and fairly differentiate employee performance “is doomed to failure,” President Kelley said.