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Washington, D.C.—The proposed new head of the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has an opportunity to correct the serious management mistakes of the past and improve lagging morale at the agency by working with employees to develop a fair and workable performance appraisal plan (PAP), the head of the union representing PTO employees said today.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) offered that assessment as the Senate Judiciary Committee began a hearing on the nomination of Jon W. Dudas to be Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and director of PTO.

NTEU represents employees of the PTO in two chapters, including trademark attorneys who are faced with an agency proposal to impose harsh and unworkable production standards in the wake of the layoff of more than 100 trademark attorneys—about one-third of the workforce—some 18 months ago.

Dudas, who is acting head of PTO, “is faced with a crisis in morale that is not of his own making,” President Kelley said, “but it is a crisis nonetheless.” She called on members of the Judiciary Committee to encourage Dudas to work with employees to develop appropriate production standards.

PTO laid off the trademark attorneys despite warnings by NTEU of adverse consequences not only on employees but on PTO’s customers as well. Since then, the new case backlog of trademark applications has risen sharply, as have other key measures of customer service—all indicating a decline in service.

In the wake of the reduction-in-force, PTO now plans to move ahead with a new performance appraisal plan with seriously-compressed timetables and demands for levels of perfection that are so stringent as to be unworkable, President Kelley said.

The changes, she added, would mean that employees who earned an outstanding appraisal under the current system would, with the same production level, be rated as marginal or even unacceptable workers.

“The result of the unnecessary RIF in 2002 is an unwise and unfair job performance plan and a serious slump in employee morale in 2004,” President Kelley. “This is not the way to run the agency that protects the country’s intellectual property, and I truly hope the incoming director will move aggressively to address the obvious issues raised by the PAP.”

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