As labor and management leaders begin setting up "partnership" councils through which they'll work together to solve workplace problems, one nagging question remains: How to measure if their partnerships are working.

The administration has proposed one possible metric of success: the number of employee grievances, bargaining disputes and unfair labor practices. If they decline, advocates reason, that would suggest a more productive and healthy labor environment.

But the head of largest federal union has, for now, blocked using that as a metric.

"It's a false expectation to think that grievances are going to plummet because we have forums that are working on really other issues," said American Federation of Government Employees National President John Gage at a Feb. 26 meeting between senior labor and Obama administration officials. "I'm not going to tell my people to stop filing grievances or anything else. Grievance procedure is a good thing."

Instead, the council of labor and administration officials — called the National Council on Federal Labor-Management Relations — adopted a lower-priority metric that called only for the increased use of alternative dispute resolution.

But that will not likely be the last word on the subject.

Other council members disagree with Gage's objection and his assumption that tracking grievances would create artificial pressure to discourage their use. National Treasury Employees Union National President Colleen Kelley said that when labor-management partnerships existed during the Clinton administration, agencies that had successful partnerships saw grievances and other disputes drop naturally.

Michael Kerr, the Labor Department's assistant secretary for administration and management, said that "people don't have to rely on [grievance] rights" if their relationships with managers are healthy. "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."

Senior Executives Association President Carol Bonosaro said that although Gage's views "were given deference" by the council, she plans to continue pushing for a way to measure grievances and other disputes. Bonosaro doesn't object to ignoring grievances filed by individuals, and said individual disputes over things such as disciplinary actions are not good indicators of overall labor-management relations. But she believes tracking national grievances or unfair labor practices would be vital.

The issue is "not dead as far as I'm concerned," Bonosaro said. "I'm hopeful I can present [a compromise metric] in a way that Mr. Gage can agree, and if he doesn't, the rest of the council can say this is a reasonable alternative. But if we don't address [the metrics issue] now, they surely will arise later."

Other ways to measure success

The debate over metrics is not merely academic, experts say. Without reliable metrics, the partnerships risk ending up as feel-good exercises that don't improve the workplace climate and make agencies operate more efficiently.

Some say that a lack of effective metrics was a key problem with the government's previous stab at partnerships, under the Clinton administration, and made it hard to argue they should be continued when the White House changed hands. Under those partnerships, union leaders and managers routinely met to find ways to make agencies work better. But President Bush dissolved them after taking office in 2001.

President Obama issued an executive order in December that established the National Council on Federal Labor-Management Relations, which is made up of senior agency leaders, union presidents, and heads of two management associations, and ordered it to reinstate the partnerships.

At its inaugural Feb. 26 meeting, the council agreed on other metrics to measure increases in productivity, cost savings, customer and employee satisfaction, employee morale, and drops in attrition rates, among others.

AFGE apart

The metrics issue isn't the only area where Gage signaled AFGE's intention to take a leading role in shaping the partnership councils. He volunteered to sit on a four-member working group that will review agencies' proposed plans for implementing the partnerships, which are due March 9. That working group will review roughly 200 implementation plans so the council can have a complete package ready by its next meeting, scheduled for April 7.

Gage told the council he wants AFGE to have its own forums at the Defense Department, separate from other unions. AFGE represents about 60 percent of Defense's bargaining-unit workers, he said.

In a March 4 interview with Federal Times, Gage said AFGE hopes to create its own forums at additional agencies where it represents most workers, such as the Veterans Affairs Department and Social Security Administration.

If a forum includes all of an agency's unions, Gage said the discussions will be superficial and touch only on the broadest issues.

"I'm looking for more efficiency here," Gage told Federal Times. "It's just unwieldy to have 33 unions around a table. We've seen this movie before, and we think the results started finally getting accomplished when [we] got down closer to the shop floor."

Some other labor leaders, such as Bill Dougan, national president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, don't see it that way.

"I'm disappointed in AFGE's decision to want to have their own separate forum … and equally — if not more — disappointed that DoD has chosen to allow these separate forums," Dougan said in a March 3 interview. "Those statements [by Gage at the Feb. 26 meeting] caught the entire group off guard."

Dougan said creating two separate partnership forums at Defense could unnecessarily complicate the process, and said there are many unanswered questions as to how they will work.

"Does it mean DoD is recognizing two official forums at the departmental level, or does it mean one is official and one is not?" Dougan said. "These questions haven't been answered yet. If you're holding two sets of meetings all the time, the time that's invested in people sitting at the table has doubled. It definitely does complicate things in terms of knowing what all the issues are and makes it more difficult to ensure that all viewpoints are being discussed and considered."

But NTEU's Kelley said that separate forums for different unions could make sense for some agencies.

"Forcing groups of employees and unions together without anything in common won't help," Kelley said. "I don't think it's one size fits all."

Issues on the table

It remains to be seen exactly what issues will be discussed through these partnerships. Obama's executive order does not require partnerships to bargain over so-called permissive subjects, such as the number, types and grades of employees assigned to an organization, and the types of technologies used on particular jobs. Those have traditionally been issues managers have decided on their own and told unions after the fact.

But the council will soon set up a handful of pilot projects that will test bargaining over permissive subjects. The council intends to report on the results of those pilots by November 2011.

Darryl Perkinson, national president of the Federal Managers Association, hopes the partnerships will improve communications between managers and the workforce. For example, front-line managers and workers could use the partnerships to discuss how to improve computer systems or work processes.

"It will dilute some of the false information out there about the dynamic of management being against the workforce," Perkinson said. "One of the key things is to provide managers at all levels and workers a voice, and push conversations down to the lowest level. They will describe the things they need on a daily basis to make their jobs easier."

Dougan said issues that partnership forums could handle might include dress codes or alternative work schedules.