Professional Airways Systems Specialists and Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration, Kansas City, Missouri, 0-NG-2702, December 8, 2003, 59 FLRA No. 79.

A proposal allowing employees to take work assignments home in order to complete an assignment on a weekend or during the evening and be compensated with compensatory time or overtime excessively interferes with the right to assign work. "Although the Agency would retain the right to deny an employee's request to take work home, the proposal would operate to severely restrict the Agency's right to do so."

The disputed proposal reads as follows:

BUEs [bargaining unit employees] are allowed to take any additional work assignments home. These assignments can be completed either during the weekend and/or evening during the week. As compensation they will receive comp time or true time and a half.

FLRA interpreted the proposal to mean that an employee wanting to take a work assignment home in order to complete an assignment would request permission to do so and provide management with a justification supporting the request. It was expected that management would generally approve such a request, and that the employee would receive comp time or overtime pay for completing the assignments at home.

FLRA found that the proposal affected management's right to assign work, which includes the right to determine the particular duties to be assigned, when work assignments will occur, to whom or what positions the duties will be assigned, to assign overtime, and to determine when overtime will be performed.

It went on to reject the union's claims that the proposal was a negotiable procedure or an appropriate arrangement. It rejected the claim that the proposal was a procedure, noting that "proposals that restrict management's ability to determine to whom overtime assignments will be made do not constitute negotiable procedures[.]"

Nor was the proposal an appropriate arrangement. Although the union claimed that the proposal would benefit employees by allowing them to complete work assignments in a timely and professional manner, these asserted benefits didn't outweigh the burdens placed on management's right to assign work.

Although the Agency would retain the right to deny an employee's request to take work home, the proposal would operate to severely restrict the Agency's right to do so. As we have interpreted the proposal, it would require the Agency "generally" to approve employee requests to take work home. The Union explained that, by the use of the term "generally," management "will be expected to approve the request if the employee has presented justification . . . ." Conference Record at 2. Management would be able to deny an employee's request only where there is no justification at all or in other limited unspecified circumstances. On balance, we find that the intrusion on the exercise of management's right to assign work outweighs any benefits to employees.

FLRA accordingly dismissed the union's petition for review.

What's unusual about the union's proposal is that although it allows management to deny employee requests to take work home for completion, the grounds for denying such requests are so restricted as to almost compel management to grant such requests. Absent these restrictions, the proposal would have been virtually meaningless (it would merely have allowed employees to make certain requests) and probably negotiable. (See, in this connection, 55 FLRA No. 42, reported in Significant Cases No. 128, where a differently constituted Authority, in response to an agency claim that an interpretation of a disapproved provision defining "emergency" made the proposal meaningless, in effect said that a proposal could be negotiable even though meaningless. "We leave to the parties," said FLRA in that case, "the determination whether a provision is meaningful.")