WASHINGTON, June 28 (UPI) -- A U.S. appeals court has upheld a ruling effectively killing large parts of a proposed overhaul of the personnel system at the Department of Homeland Security.
"The government's position ... defies common sense," read a unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The labor unions that brought the case hailed it as a victory for workers' rights and national security. "Frontline employees are (homeland security's) best resources and the regulations are so regressive that it would have been difficult for (the department) to retain its professional, skilled workforce," said Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.
The judgment upheld last year's ruling by the D.C. District Court that the department had overstepped the boundaries given to it by Congress in the law that set it up.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 gave officials the authority to write a new personnel system for the department, but after a bitter rearguard action by Democrats, also included a requirement that the system preserve collective bargaining rights for homeland security's 180,000-strong workforce.
The appeal court wrote that the proposed new system, known as MAX-HR, "does not even give an illusion of collective bargaining," because -- as the lower court found last year -- it effectively allowed the department to override any negotiated agreement by issuing a department-wide directive.
But the court also found that the new rules illegally limited the scope of bargaining to single employee-specific personnel matters, excluding more general issues, such as a system for allocating overtime.
