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Washington, D.C.—The leader of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) promised that throughout 2006 the union would continue to press federal agencies to make opportunities for participation in telework programs available to far more of their employees.

“Telework is a proven positive addition not just to the work lives of federal employees, but in very important ways to their agencies as well,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley. NTEU has been the leader among federal sector unions in seeking to broaden telework opportunities.

Kelley took the occasion of the recent release of a report on telework issued by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the General Services Administration (GSA) to reaffirm NTEU’s strong commitment to the programs. And she emphasized NTEU’s long-held belief that the key to successful telework programs is a far greater commitment to it by agency managers. Such a commitment clearly continues to be lacking at many federal worksites, she said.

The OPM-GSA report showed that in 2004, fully four years after a federal law set out a clear requirement that executive branch agencies significantly broaden telework opportunities, only 19 percent of eligible federal workers were able to take advantage of the programs. “That’s less than one in five,” President Kelley said. “We’ve got to do much better than that, and we can.”

The NTEU leader pointed to a telling passage in the report that only 20 of 82 federal agencies surveyed said they had conducted any initiatives during the year to increase management support for telework. This lack of managerial enthusiasm, she said, is “a major stumbling block” in having telework programs fulfill their considerable potential to improve worker productivity.

Kelley cited NTEU’s varied experiences with telework in the agencies where it is the exclusive collective bargaining representative. One such agency—the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO)—often is held up as the model of a union-agency negotiated program. This year, 180 trademark examining attorneys are working from home; that’s 54 percent of the trademark examining corps. Thirty other trademark professionals are taking part in the program, as well.

Meanwhile, Kelley said, even though NTEU has negotiated “good contract language” on telework with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the program there is lagging because of managerial roadblocks. And at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Kelley said that, despite a successful telework pilot at ATF four years ago, the agency refuses to bargain with NTEU over a workable program.

NTEU is joined in its support of telework by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) who, earlier this year, secured an NTEU-supported rider to the fiscal 2006 Commerce, Justice, Science and State (CJS) Appropriations bill that would impose a $5 million penalty on federal agencies that fail to meet certain benchmarks either toward establishment or better implementation of their telework programs.

Increased use of telework programs, President Kelley noted, would also help agencies respond to President Bush’s push earlier this year encouraging federal departments to find ways to conserve energy.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments.