PAD 530 Week 7 Discussion 1 Public Employee Unions in a New Era

Week 7 Discussion 1

“Public Employee Unions in a New Era” Please respond to the following:

Refer to Chapter 8, which points out that the New Era of public employee unions has nothing to do with who controls federal policy making in Washington, D.C. The chapter focuses on the issues that public employees face daily as a result of agency mandates, policies, and procedures that can, at any time, have an adverse impact on job performance as well as fiscal constraints and budgetary resources. Assume your agency wants to discourage union involvement. Recommend at least two strategies your agency could implement to encourage and discourage its employees from seeking union representation.

Often time’s employees join unions because of their disappointment with how they are being treated by management.  Two strategies the Department of Education could implement to discourage employees from seeking union representation are competitive wages and fair and consistent policies and practices.  Providing competitive wages is an incentive to improving quality and alleviating shortages among educators.  With the competitive wages, implementing fair and consistent policies and practices is critical.  Stricter tenure rules should also be put in place.  In fact, “If we want to attract, retain, and motivate the best and the brightest, we need to raise the starting salaries of teachers to be competitive with other professions.  says Bob Willoughby, Associate Director of Research with the New Jersey Education Association

From the first eActivity, select one of the news events regarding NTEU and provide a brief critique of the issues.

The event I found interesting was the cyber-attack which occurred on June 4, 2015.  The article stated that “the hackers may have accessed the personal data of 4 million federal employees and retirees” (“Kelley,” 2015, para. 5).  The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is seeking free credit and identity theft protection for all federal employees.  I think that the OPM should provide free credit and identity theft protection for all of its employees and retirees.  The highly detailed information that was hacked could be used to create fake identities, which could potentially damage individual’s credit and ruin lives.  It will be interesting to see what preventive measures the OPM take to ensure that an attack of this magnitude does not happen again.

References

http://www.nea.org/home/35916.htm

http://www.nteu.org/PressKits/PressRelease/PressRelease.aspx?ID=4038