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Washington, D.C: -- The head of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said today an arbitrator's decision has strengthened the hand of federal employees and their unions in efforts to get agencies to follow the dictates of an Executive Order dealing with bargaining over so called "permissive" subjects.

"This decision," said NTEU President Robert M. Tobias, "points in the direction of i expanded bargaining rights for federal employees." That, he added, is good news not just for employees, but their agencies and the public alike "because it gets the parties talking over a wide range of subjects about their respective needs and how best to accomplish the agency's mission."

Tobias said that Arbitrator Roger P. Kaplan "upheld in full" NTEU's position that the Internal Revenue Service, in concluding a 1994 partnership agreement with the union, not only recognized the right of the union to bargain over `permissive' subjects, but

The arbitration case involved local bargaining between NTEU and the IRS at its Memphis Service Center, Tobias said. When negotiations stalled, the agency refused to take the matter to the Federal Service Impasses Panel (FSIP).

"IRS had signed off in the partnership agreement on not only its willingness to bargain over permissive subjects," Tobias said, "but to take disputed issues to third?party?resolution." He said he was "quite pleased" that the arbitrator refused to let the agency back out of its agreement.

In the Memphis case, the IRS argued that, despite the contractual language to which it had agreed, it was not obligated to take the stalled matters to the FSIP because the items at issue were permissive, rather than mandatory, subjects of bargaining under federal labor law.

Tobias added that Arbitrator Kaplan understood that NTEU was seeking to enforce the terms of its agreement with IRS over the manner of addressing unresolved issues when bargaining over permissive matters outlined in the Executive Order.

In a related matter, NTEU is counsel for the Patent Office Professional Association (POPA) in a case brought against the Commerce Department's Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) that turns on the meaning of language in the 1993 Executive Order requiring agencies to bargain, at the union's request, over permissive subjects. The case is presently scheduled for hearing May 11 before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Along with PTO, there are other federal agencies disputing that President Clinton's Order is an "election" within the meaning of Section 7106(b)(1) of the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Act, thus obligating them to bargain over permissive subjects identified in that section of the law. NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing more than 155,000 employees in 21 agencies and departments.