Ames Federal Employees Union complaint: “slandering NASA’s civil servant workforce”

To: vnovak@mail.hq.nasa.gov

From: …@mail.arc.nasa.gov

Subject: slandering NASA’s civil servant workforce

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004

September 28, 2004

Ms. Vicki Novak

Chief Human Capital Officer

NASA Headquarters

Dear Ms. Novak,

Last Monday, you stated that one of your legislative
priorities would be to seek expanded Demonstration
Personnel System authority to allow management to deal with
poor performers. broadcast is archived at
http://insidenasa.nasa.gov/nasa_nas/ops/NASA_transformation/NASA_trans_webcast_arch.html

This plan is wrongheaded for at least two reasons.

First, NASA does not have a poor-performer problem. Your
statement demeans the hard working men and women of this
Agency who have dedicated their professional lives to NASA.
You owe NASA’s rank-and-file workforce an apology. It is
outrageous that NASA’s Chief Human Capital Officer would
imply that poor performance is a major problem at NASA
without any evidence to back this up. If you believe that
poor performance is such a problem that it should trigger a
request for additional legislative relief, why then did you
not mention this in your Senate testimony on July 20th
about NASA’s workforce planning?

Second, NASA does have a documented problem of management
retaliation and intimidation targeting dissenters. The
CAIB report blamed, in part, this management culture
problem for the death of the Columbia astronauts, so this
is no small problem. As you are well aware, Title V gives
management plenty of authority to handle those rare
instances of poor performance, but it does so with proper
safeguards against abuse of power and with proper
protection of the due process rights of employees. Any
attempt to weaken these protections at this time is
particularly inappropriate given management’s ongoing
propensity for retaliation. The fact that civil servants
cannot be disciplined/fired arbitrarily or capriciously is
one of the reasons that civil servants can speak up about
critical issues such as “foam shedding”, while contractors
are often forced to remain silent because they can be fired
at will.

Furthermore, NASA management has recently begun describing
its civil service employees with offensive euphemisms. NASA
employees should never be referred to as “excess capacity”
or “legacy FTEs” as though they were mere lifeless cogs in
management’s wheel. They are scientists who turned down
tenure-track jobs at prestigious academic institutions to
serve the cause of exploration. They are engineers who
turned down lucrative private sector jobs to dedicate
themselves to the public good. They are talented and
dedicated support staff who have devoted their careers to
NASA and their country. NASA’s civil service employees
deserve the respect they have earned from their years of
service to our Agency.

NASA is facing a morale crisis which, in large part, has
been created by the overt hostility and disdain some senior
managers have displayed for NASA’s civil-servant workforce.
Their attitude and associated actions are seriously
harming the Agency. It is especially important for NASA’s
Chief Human Capital Officer to show greater respect for
NASA’s civil servants and to pay greater attention to the
cancerous culture of casual contempt still pervasive within
NASA’s management.

Sincerely,

Marc Cohen, President

Lee Stone, Vice President for Legislative Affairs

Paul Davis, Vice President for Negotiations

Suzanne Meyer, Vice President for Membership

Roger Ashbaugh, Vice President for Publicity

Monty Bailey, Vice President for Safety (acting)

Mark Hightower, Secretary (acting)

Chris Knight, co-chair Partnership Council

Ames Federal Employees Union

International Federation of Professional and Technical< Engineers, Local 30