Lieberman:
Preserve Homeland Security Workers’ Rights
Strong Department Depends on Workers’ Commitment, Morale
Work with Federal employees, Not
Against Them
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
WASHINGTON - Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman
Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., Senators Barbara Mikulski, D-Md. and
Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, held a press conference today to
highlight the importance of preserving existing workplace
protections for employees in the new Department of Homeland
Security. The
Senators were joined by border patrol agent Mark Hall, who was
retaliated against for publicizing security vulnerabilities,
and Mike Staples, President of the Arlington Professional
Firefighters and Paramedics Association, and a rescue worker
at the Pentagon on September 11.
Following is the text of Senator Lieberman’s remarks.
Welcome. It’s
a pleasure stand today alongside two public servants who are
union members working everyday to protect our nation’s
security, to talk about how we plan to build a strong domestic
defense agency together without compromising their personal
economic security.
We can’t stand by silently when
we hear people, including President Bush, claim that
protecting the homeland is somehow incompatible with
maintaining the union rights of 50,000 employees who will be
transferred into the new department.
The position the President has taken is a dangerous
distraction and detour from our urgent, shared mission here:
to build an accountable, efficient, and effective
Department of Homeland Security.
We have a good bill in the Senate that gives the
President at least 90 percent of what he asked for—which, I
might add, was 90 percent of what we called for in our initial
legislation. This
is no time to let ourselves be divided by a partisan
ideological sideshow that’s only peripherally related to
homeland security.
We stand together, across party
lines, in our commitment to create this department.
Let’s not let this unreasonable rancor about the
rights of federal workers fray our unity.
The second problem is that it’s
just not right. The
fact is, union rights are not an obstacle to building the best
possible Homeland Security Department we can build.
And to insist that they are, as the President has, is
an insult to the good job that those unionized employees do,
and a threat to the economic security their unions provide
them.
That’s the message that the
public servants who are with us today can help convey.
Union rights aren’t the problem here.
Those who seek to strip away workers security under the
pretense of homeland security are the problem.
The public servants who risked
and lost their lives on September 11th, including
hundreds of police officers and firefighters, were union
members. That
didn’t limit their sense of duty and courage, and Mike
Stapples can attest to that.
And Mark Hall, the border patrol agent who’s with us
today, is a union member.
That hasn’t hurt his performance.
In fact, it saved his job when he lost it after
exposing those vulnerabilities in our border security.
And we’re fortunate that today, as a result of those
union protections, he’s back on the border—not on the
sidelines of the homeland security fight.
President Bush is fond of using
the term “management flexibility” as the justification for
the restrictions on union and civil service rights he wants to
permit. But the
fact is, our bill would provide the Secretary new
flexibilities to manage the work force that have been agreed
on by the unions and our committee.
Our proposal allows the secretary to bring people on
outside of civil service rules when necessary for homeland
security; and make other valuable changes that will help the
new department hire, retain, and reward the best talent.
All of those reforms represent a meaningful
modernization of the way federal agencies are managed.
What we say on union rights is simple.
From 1979 on, the last five Presidents have had the
authority to take away the collective bargaining rights of
particular departments or subdivisions by executive order, if
and when they decide national security is at stake.
The union rights of these 50,000 employees who will be
transferred into the new department have never been targeted
for removal. Neither
President Carter, or President Reagan, the first President
Bush, President Clinton, nor this President Bush in the first
year and a half he’s been in office, has determined that the
union membership of these federal workers in any way has
hampered their ability to do their job.
So we say in this bill that came out of committee, when
these employees become part of the new department, they keep
their collective bargaining rights—unless their job is
changed, and there’s a national security rationale for
taking those rights away.
In that event, the Secretary can remove collective
bargaining rights on a case-by-case basis.
He just has to say why.
It’s hard for me to understand
why some people object to that or want more rights to deprive
workers of their rights. They
seem to believe the way to build a strong department of
homeland security is to start out by weakening the foundation
of the department—which is the sense of commitment, morale,
devotion, and economic security.
I think our obligation is to work with these
dedicated federal employees, not to work against them
from the get go.
Thank you.
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