The president of a union representing the administrative law judges who adjudicate disability claims has accused the Social Security Administration of bargaining in bad faith. The accusation follows news that federal mediators declared the agency and union to be at impasse in negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement.
Association of Administrative Law Judges President Melissa McIntosh said her union has filed an internal grievance with the agency over its negotiating practices as they discuss a new contract. She said she believes management is focused on standardizing contracts with disparate bargaining units, rather than on improving efficiency for taxpayers. ...
The agency’s “last best offer” to the union, which was reviewed by Government Executive, includes several proposals that have become standard in the Trump administration, including shifting telework policies to be entirely at the discretion of the agency and a drastic reduction in the amount of official time the union can use. In this case, SSA proposed a 90% cut to official time, from an annual bank of 22,000 hours in the current contract to only 2,000 hours. ...
Equally troubling to the administrative law judges are proposals throughout the contract to remove references to the Administrative Procedures Act and an article affirming the “judicial function” of ALJs at the agency. The judicial function article lays out several key duties of administrative law judges, including the power to call for expert witnesses and ensure due process rights of claimants. ...I'm not sure that removing the reference to the Administrative Procedure Act matters but it's interesting that they want to remove it.
A controversial [Social Security Administrative Law] judge who was disciplined in Texas over his refusal to watch a LGBT sensitivity training video has transferred to Franklin, Tenn., where he now hears cases from Tennesseans who believe they were wrongly denied federal disability benefits.
The judge, Gary Suttles, was also the subject of an internal inquiry after a Texas newspaper reported he had made disparaging remarks to a Gulf War veteran seeking disability for service-related health problems.
Veterans groups expressed outrage. The Social Security Administration issued an apology for the judge's comments. ...
There is a longstanding tradition of encouraging ALJs who become controversial to transfer. It foists the troublesome ALJ on another region. However, controversial ALJs generally remain controversial even after they've moved.Three Nashville-area attorneys who routinely represent clients in disability hearings said they were concerned about whether their clients, who include veterans and people of all sexual orientations, can get a fair hearing before Suttles. The three attorneys requested anonymity because they could appear before Suttles in the future. ...
... [T]he Federal Trade Commission is reminding consumers that scammers are increasingly trying to make a buck by falsely claiming to be Uncle Sam. Monthly complaints to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network about scammers pretending to be from the government reached the highest levels on record this spring.
Since 2014, consumers have filed nearly 1.3 million reports about these cons, far more than any other type of fraud. The FTC received about 46,600 complaints in May alone from consumers who were contacted by someone falsely claiming to be from the Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, or another government entity, according to the latest FTC Consumer Protection Data Spotlight. These scammers may tell people that their Social Security number has been suspended, which does not happen, or that they are facing arrest because they owe back taxes, and demand payment from the consumer to avoid getting into trouble. Often, they demand that a consumer pay with a gift card, which is a dead giveaway that the consumer is dealing with a scammer.
While only 6 percent of consumers who report a government imposter scam say they lost money, when people do report a loss, it is a significant amount. The median amount consumers reported losing to a government imposter scam from January 2018 through May of this year was $960. Consumers under the age of 60 report losing money at higher rates than consumers over that age, but median individual reported losses increase with age. ...The 46,600 number for May is only the number who complained. Vastly more people received calls but didn't complain. I know. I'm one of them. So is my wife. So are many, perhaps most, of my readers.
Workers at the Social Security Administration (SSA) say that the Trump administration has imposed a new contract on their 45,000 workers that could effectively shut down their union and are warning that the same thing could be tried elsewhere in the federal government as part of a crackdown on the labor movement.
A federal panel, consisting mainly of Trump-appointed members, issued a decision in May to impose a new union contract for the 45,000 federal employees at the SSA. The move came despite a federal judge’s decision last year to strike down most provisions in similarly issued orders for violating collective bargaining rights for federal employees. ...
“If the agency is successful in implementing this panel order, it will decimate our ability to represent workers all over the country,” said Rich Couture, an agency employee for more than 30 years and the union’s chief negotiator.
The provisions in the new contract will reduce the time allotted to SSA employees for union activity from 250,000 hours annually to 50,000 hours and ban all workers from using government property to conduct union activities, such as office spaces and government emails and holding files on government computers or in offices. It will also grant management the discretion to eliminate remote work. ...
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said David Cann, director of bargaining for the AFGE. “As we’ve been in negotiation with the Trump administration, we’ve seen a level of hostility toward labor unions that is unique and more coordinated from what we’ve seen with other administrations, even Republican administrations that are philosophically opposed to the mission of labor and the empowerment of workers.” ...
“Once Trump signed those executive orders, all employees who were union representatives lost the right to hold files in their offices, lost the right to represent employees unless we used our own personal leave or leave without pay and even with that management wouldn’t approve leave to represent people,” said Sherry Jackson, a social security field office employee in Connecticut who also works as a union representative in her region. ...
