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Washington, D.C.--The more than 320 Washington-based employees of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), have voted overwhelmingly to be represented by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU). The vote was 178-to-36 in favor of representation.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing more than 155,000 employees in 20 federal agencies and departments.

NTEU President Robert M. Tobias said NTEU is "particularly pleased to be able to bring the benefits of federal unionism to the highly-skilled, professional and motivated men and women of NCHS."

He is confident, he said, that, working with the employees, "NTEU will be able to raise the visibility of employee concerns, and provide mechanisms for them to have a meaningful say in their workplace." At present, NCHS employees are represented by a management official on the (HHS) Partnership Council.

The work of NCHS is to provide statistical information to state and local governments, as well as to private and public bodies of all sorts, to help guide the development of health policies affecting all Americans. As part of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and among its other activities, it helps provide mobile health services in both urban and rural areas:-Many among NCHS employees are skilled computer programmers, interviewers and survey experts, and statisticians.

Jan Moore, a 20-year NCHS veteran who works as a program operations assistant, said that a variety of issues fueled the drive to unionize, including inadequate training, a lack of fairness in promotional opportunities and the chance to have a voice in the workplace.

Another activist in the organizing campaign, Nancy Gagan, said that employees are "looking forward to having a real grievance procedure," noting that employees previously faced a "management always wins" result when issues were pursued through existing equal employment opportunity channels at NCHS.

Gagan also said that a long-standing management unwillingness to share information with employees has been a problem, particularly more recently in light of a possible move from NCHS's Hyattsville, Md., headquarters at the end of this year. "We need both information and input," she said, "and I'm confident NTEU will help us get that."

Statistician Anjani Chandra pointed to a lack of management fairness s, a key issue, among several, in the decision to unionize. "We have flextime and compnsatory hours.** she said, "but these programs are not equitably distributed. They are pretty much at the whim of management."