With one small exception, federal agencies are so far unwilling to offer expanded bargaining rights to federal employees, as many unions want.

Of 45 agencies that have created new labor-management councils, only the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) has volunteered to negotiate with unions over so-called permissive subjects, according to the National Council on Labor-Management Relations. Permissive subjects are workplace decisions — traditionally decided by managers — that include, for example, the types of technologies that are used in the workplace, and the number, types and grades of employees assigned to an organization.

Yesterday, Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry urged federal labor-management leaders to subject such workplace decisions to collective bargaining on an experimental basis at more agencies.

OPM said many agencies are waiting for further guidance on the scope of the pilot projects — specifically whether they should be agencywide or can be limited to specific bargaining units — before deciding whether they will participate.

"In practice, it makes most sense to negotiate them at the bargaining unit level, but that can't be done well until the forums are up and meeting," OPM spokesman Edgar Gonzalez said in a statement. "We will work with the agencies to move this forward by the next meeting of the national council on May 5."

Carol Bonosaro, president of the Senior Executives Association, said she is concerned that if pilot programs have been "cherry-picked" to limit negotiations to only certain permissive topics, the experiment will not yield reliable data. NCUA, for example, said in its implementation plan that it wanted to negotiate only over hardware and off-the-shelf software supporting that hardware, but not software developed in-house.

The council also agreed to set up a separate work group to decide whether larger unions should have separate forums. American Federation of Government Employees President John Gage, who in February said his union should have its own forums at the Defense Department apart from other unions, will sit on that work group. Two representatives of smaller federal unions — National Association of Government Employees National President David Holway and National Federation of Federal Employees National President Bill Dougan — will also be members, along with the deputy secretaries of the Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Treasury departments.

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