Home Media Center News Releases

Washington, D.C. — The leader of the union representing thousands of federal telework employees welcomed new legislation introduced yesterday by Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) that will allow more federal employees to participate in telework programs.

H.R. 4106 was introduced with bipartisan support just two days after National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) President Colleen M. Kelley provided testimony in support of expanded federal telework options to the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia. Rep. Davis chairs the subcommittee.

“NTEU appreciates the commitment of Chairman Danny Davis to finding ways to increase participation in federal telework programs,” President Kelley said, noting that the most recent information provided by the Office of Personnel Management indicates that only 6.6 percent of the federal workforce participates in any form of telework.

The Telework Improvement Act of 2007 is co-sponsored by Reps. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. It intends to spur the increased use of telework (or flexiplace) across the federal government and to create a reliable method to measure and track federal telework programs.

“Telework has increasingly been viewed as an important tool for ensuring the continuity of essential government services in a time of crisis,” Rep. Danny Davis said. “This legislation will increase the number of federal employees who are allowed to telework and thereby, better prepare the government for emergency events.”

Under the legislation, agencies would be required to:

•

Develop a telework program that allows employees to telework at least 20 percent of every two-week work period;

•

Designate a senior level employee to serve as a ‘telework managing officer’; and

•

Incorporate telework into their continuous operational planning.

“Despite their many benefits, telework programs are unevenly implemented across federal agencies,” Kelley said. “This legislation would help even that out.”

Telework not only benefits the government, it also cuts down on congestion and pollution while creating a more family-friendly workplace. “Telework reduces employees’ energy use and can bring about increased efficiency due to uninterrupted time for them to plan work,” President Kelley said. “That will improve employees’ productivity and their overall quality of life.”

The barriers to successful telework are not just operational, they also include management resistance. NTEU has contractual flexiplace agreements with several agencies, with varying degrees of success.

The negotiated program at the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) serves as a model agency program with more than 85 percent of the trademark attorneys participating in some form of telework.

On the other hand, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has denied NTEU’s request that 50 Legal Instrument Examiners, who were moved to West Virginia from Washington, D.C.—resulting in a three hour commute for some employees—be allowed to telework. ATF claims that to allow these employees to telework would require them to modernize their system to switch from paper to electronic form processing, which the agency is reluctant to do.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.