Senior Obama administration and federal labor officials met today in the first attempt at forging labor-management partnerships at 200 federal agencies.

A new National Council on Federal Labor-Management Relations is overseeing the effort, and today appointed a four-member working group to review agencies' plans for how they will create labor-management partnerships. The four are American Federation of Government Employees National President John Gage; National Association of Government Employees National President David Holway; Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Jane Lute; and Veterans Affairs Deputy Secretary Scott Gould.

John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management and co-chairman of the national council, said he wants the council to have a complete package of implementation plans ready by its next meeting, April 7.

Berry said plans will be posted on the council's Web site as they are received.

Most of the council's initial work dealt with establishing its guiding principles and proposing metrics to measure the effectiveness of the partnerships.

Gage disagreed with one proposed metric to measure improvements in labor-management relations: declines in grievances, bargaining disputes and unfair labor practices filed by employees.

"It's a false expectation to think that grievances are going to plummet because we have forums that are working on really other issues," Gage said. "I'm not going to tell my people to stop filing grievances or anything else. Grievance procedure is a good thing."

Other council members felt tracking grievance declines could provide a useful indicator of the workplace climate. Colleen Kelley, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said agencies that have had successful partnerships in the past saw grievances and other disputes drop.

Michael Kerr, the Labor Department's assistant secretary for administration and management, agreed. "In healthy relationships, people don't have to rely on rights," he said. "What we would hope is that over time as the relationship improves, rather than relying on legal recourse or contractual recourse, that the resolution of problems would occur more in an informal way or in a bargaining setting."

However, the council agreed to strike that metric and replace it with a lower-priority metric that calls for increasing the use of dispute resolution.

President Obama issued an executive order in December establishing the council and ordering it to reinstate the partnerships that operated throughout the federal government during the Clinton administration. President Bush dissolved the partnerships, under which unions and managers routinely met to find ways to make agencies work better, immediately after taking office in 2001.