By Ron Ault

Here is just another example of the DOD employees we represent who are saving lives in the war on terrorism, volunteering to serve overseas from the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia...these loyal civil service employees are not making a dime more money than they would working in the safety of the shipyard, coming home every night to their wives and children....unlike the KBR contractor employees who make six figures and pay no federal income tax on the first $87,000 of income...and they are doing it without NSPS!

In fact, we fought two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq and defeated the USSR in the cold war without NSPS...

I am frustrated by the attitude George Nesterchucz and Ron Saunders bring to the table every day of the past three weeks of the meet and confer process.

Just because DOD says it doesn't make it so! This is just so much smoke and mirrors. And no one is holding DOD accountable; not Congress; not our so called free press- no one....NSPS is very dangerous and a disaster waiting to happen. I predict it will destroy the civil service before its expiration "sunset" period of six years.

NSPS is NO SECURITY PERSONNEL SYSTEM! I continue to tell DOD in our meetings... "Forget about the unions...the employees are going to be DOD's worst nightmare in this harebrained scheme. Costs will go through the roof, employee morale will drop like a rock and
reliability, productivity, teamwork...all gone." I always caution our new union reps in training class I conduct..."be careful what you ask
for, you might just get it"....As one of the Heritage Foundation authors (Moffit) of this mess said in an interview the Washington Post
recently..."wow, they really are going to do this!"

Yes Mr. Moffit, they really are going to risk it all on a theory that you, Don Devine and George Nesterchucz wrote about and published January 10, 2001, some nine months before the 9-11 attacks...only it is framed using the visual terminology of "National Security Personnel System" instead of the less persuasive framing of "Taking Charge of Federal Personnel" title you used when you published it on the Heritage Foundation website.

Unlike the false and misleading figures of $158 Million DOD is predicting NSPS will cost, I say if we use the conservative estimates
from the DHS NSPS program of $10K per employee over the life of the program, DOD's NSPS will cost approximately $7 Billion dollars. And that doesn't include the lucrative contracts DOD will let to develop and conduct training, etc. Look at the Northrop Grumman contract of $175 million just to write the personnel system of NSPS....IF NSPS was necessary and essential, that would be one thing, but NSPS is a "want to have" Heritage Foundation authored Conservative Union Busting scheme, plain and simple. The US Navy is reducing its shipbuilding budget and postponing building ships this year that are desperately needed. They are retiring the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy and its battle group of ships even though the Kennedy has not reached the end of its service life. But the DOD is fully funding NSPS...it is a matter of priorities, I am told.

Meet and Confer is an absolute sham. Reasonable folks could have come to an agreement in a matter of days if they really wanted to find some common ground. Nothing we say or do is going to make any difference. If the labor organizations learned anything from the DHS experience they learned that lesson.

They worked diligently for weeks coming to agreements on a system that both parties could live with only to see them disappear when the final regulations were issued. In an effort to get something done in more than two weeks of meetings, we have given the DOD a National Level Bargaining proposal that meet and exceeds every interest DOD professed to Congress to hoodwink Congress into passing this shameful removal of worker rights.