Chicago
Whereas last year, the Bush Administration announced a plan to impose mandatory privatization quotas across the government that threaten the jobs of up to 850,000 federal employees, and
Whereas these privatization quotas are implemented through a process that requires each executive branch agency to submit annual plans to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) describing how many jobs it expects to consider outsourcing and the methods it plans to use to facilitate the outsourcing, and
Whereas although OMB has recently claimed that the privatization quotas are no longer in effect, the fact is that they remain central to the administration’s “scorecard” system for rating the performance of agencies relative to the president’s Management Agenda, and
Whereas the government has for almost 30 years had a policy that required public-private competition before the jobs of federal employees could be outsourced to private firms, and these public-private competitions have been decided on the basis of who could provide the services agencies needed at the lowest cost to taxpayers, and
Whereas the Bush Administration has issued new regulations allowing political appointees and managers to decide the winners of public-private competitions on the basis of subjective factors rather than cost, and award government contracts to firms whose bids are both more costly and less responsive than the bids of in-house, unionized federal employees, and
Whereas the privatization threat has been used repeatedly by the Bush Administration, and particularly by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to neutralize congressional opposition to elimination of federal employees’ collective bargaining and appeal rights, and the replacement of the federal pay and classification system with one that gives total control over the pay of each federal worker to supervisors. Secretary Rumsfeld has declared repeatedly that if the Defense Department cannot get the “managerial flexibility” over collective bargaining, hiring, firing, discipline and pay that it demands, it will simply outsource or privatize Defense Department civilian jobs, and
Whereas the rules governing the privatization of federal government jobs give great emphasis to private firms’ ability to undercut federal employees on their pay and benefits, and
Whereas privatization of government jobs has been shown to have a disproportionately negative impact on female and minority workers. The federal government’s diversity has been a hard-won victory for the labor movement, and women and minorities not only make up a larger share of the federal workforce than of the workforce at large, they are also more prominently represented in the ranks of professional, managerial and technical positions in the public sector than in the private sector, and
Whereas the Bush Administration’s privatization quotas affecting specific numbers and types of jobs as well as specific numbers and types of competitions have not been shown to produce either cost savings for taxpayers or improvements in the quality of service delivery, and
Whereas AFGE has filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of OMB’s unilateral redefinition of what constitutes an “inherently governmental” job that should not be privatized. In an action that would increase the number and type of federal jobs vulnerable to privatization, OMB has attempted to narrow the definition of inherently governmental so that contractors will be able to take over work ranging from tax collection to levying fines to evaluating and adjudicating applications for citizenship to handling classified communications relating to national security to overseeing and administering other government contractors,
Whereas, privatization on the federal level is creating an environment that accelerates the drive for privatization on the state and local level, threatening the reliable and cost effective delivery of goods and services,
Whereas, privatization neither saves money nor improves services. If anything, the experience is the opposite. The risky proposal advocated by the Bush administration to open air traffic control to privatization ignores the disastrous experiences around the globe, where airline near misses have soared, and governments and consumers have had to bail out flailing contractors. Many states and localities have ended contracts early—Oklahoma’s for highway maintenance and the City of Bridgeport’s for sewer services, as only two examples—because of contractors’ failure to complete work on time and safely and ongoing costs disputes that drain additional public resources. And despite a relentless ideological drive to divert public money into private school vouchers, there has been no improvement in student achievement but public school coffers have suffered.
Therefore be it resolved that the AFL-CIO will join with its affiliated unions that represent federal employees to work to defeat the pernicious quotas for outsourcing and privatization, and
Further, that the AFL-CIO will support any coordinated efforts by public employee unions to defeat this attack on government and the public sector.