Federal Grievance Arbitration Practices Need More Management Attention

With the recent expansion of the Federal labor-management relations program, arbitration has become an important procedure for adjudicating employee grievances. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 effected collective bargaining and arbitration in the Federal sector. It expanded the scope of issues subject to the negotiated grievance procedures and mandated that grievance arbitration be binding. GAO undertook a study to assess the efficiency of agencies' grievance arbitration procedures, including the use of arbitrators under the Act, and to identify areas needing improvements.

The agencies and activities reviewed have not developed formal, systematic methods for monitoring and evaluating their grievance arbitration systems. The activities do not collect the information needed to perform the monitoring functions. As a result, labor-management representatives do not know the number of formal grievances that have been filed and cannot effectively determine which activities are having problems. The Agencies need to account for their grievance arbitration costs to help prevent wasteful expenditures and to better manage their grievance arbitration processes. A number of grievance arbitration procedures currently used in the private sector, which can help reduce costs and timeframes, could be used more often in the Federal sector. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) needs this cost information to monitor agencies' efficiency and, where appropriate, to provide technical assistance. Available training courses do not emphasize the cost-effective practices which can be put to use in the grievance arbitration process. The quality of arbitration decisions can be enhanced if Federal parties select arbitrators from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) Federal arbitrator roster. The increasing number of Federal arbitrations requires an expanded Federal sector roster. Because the joint guidelines for labor relations are generally not being followed by agencies, OPM needs to take aggressive steps to assure compliance.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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