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Washington, D.C.—The leader of the union representing trademark attorneys in the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) today called on the agency to “rethink and substantially revise” a proposed new performance plan she described as “nothing more than an old-fashioned speed-up” that is already having a serious negative impact on employee morale.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said PTO’s proposed performance appraisal plan “takes the wrong approach” to improving operations at the agency. The plan dramatically increases trademark attorney production requirements while putting in place unrealistic quality standards and turnaround times, she said.

While PTO is pushing for implementation of its plan this spring, questions about low employee morale at the agency already are generating congressional interest, including the matter being raised last week during a House hearing on the PTO budget.

It is interesting, President Kelley noted, that PTO’s efforts to increase the workload of its trademark attorneys comes just 18 months after the agency reduced its trademark attorney staff by over 100 employees. NTEU opposed the 2002 reduction-in-force because the agency had not made a solid business case to support any RIF, let alone a RIF of more than 100 attorneys.

“While PTO claimed in 2002 that its workload dropped and these 100-plus employees wouldn’t be missed,” Kelley said, “it is clear now that the agency was incorrect.” To the contrary, she said,

pendency of trademark applications has risen and customer service has declined.

Kelley said that many of the proposed standards are not only arbitrarily high and unworkable, they bear little relation to the real-world operation of the job function. More than 265,000 trademark applications are filed each year.

The changes proposed by PTO are so sweeping, the NTEU leader said, that under its requirements, many trademark attorneys who earned an outstanding appraisal under the current system

would—with the same production level—be rated only marginal or even unacceptable employees.

The NTEU leader said the proposed performance plan “has all the earmarks of a workplace speed-up—demanding much more work from employees, with heavy penalties for not meeting the new goals, while providing nothing by way of additional resources of any kind to help. It’s beyond foolish.”

NTEU represents some 1,750 PTO employees in two chapters, including about 260 trademark attorneys who make up the Trademark Society represented by NTEU Chapter 245.

As the largest independent union of federal employees, NTEU represents some 150,000 workers in 29 agencies and departments.