Message to Director Chopra: Real talk on what’s happening in bargaining

Director Chopra,

Although you, as CFPB Director, have stated your desire to increase labor-management cooperation and to create a workplace where employees and their union feel respected, engaged, and can thrive free of discrimination, we are writing to express our concern that actions by CFPB management are undermining your efforts to achieve these goals.

The current state of labor-management relations is characterized by a lack of trust. While there are many contributing factors, one of the most significant (from the Union’s standpoint) is based on the failure to implement the salary review and reset in a timely manner. The parties had agreed to complete the review of employee experience data during 2021 so that pay adjustments could be made by January 2022. Although the parties had also agreed to conduct negotiations on a new pay structure early in 2021, we jointly agreed to defer those negotiations until the experience review process could be completed, so that we would know the results of that and the impact they would have on pay equity and comparability when we negotiated the new pay bands.

As you probably know, however, the salary review process has been plagued by data and quality control problems and, in the union’s view, a lack of necessary resources devoted to address and resolve these issues. While we appreciate that the CFPB has now put a new executive team in place to address these issues, which were only uncovered at the union’s insistence there be a T&I audit, the hiring of a contractor to assist in the necessary technical design and development will necessarily mean that it will take several months before we have these issues resolved and pay changes addressed at the bargaining table. Other agencies conducted and implemented similar salary reviews and resets without such delays, including CFTC, where new salaries were negotiated and reset via a joint process with NTEU in 2020, within the span of a couple of months.

Employees who have been found to be paid less than their peers with similar levels of experience, especially many Black, Latinx, and Native American employees affected by the Bureau’s well-documented pay gaps, and who will therefore be receiving pay adjustments agreed upon by the parties, should not have the implementation of these pay adjustments delayed because of Human Capital’s mismanagement of the process.

Not all Bureau employees are highly compensated, and those in the lower pay bands suffer most when their pay remains at a level lower than it should be. NTEU has been asking for CFPB management for months to agree that the effective date for these pay adjustments should be January 2022, as employees had expected and as the parties originally intended, but this request has been repeatedly ignored.

CFPB’s failure to address this issue casts a dark shadow over all dealings between the parties. But there are other important issues that also require our immediate attention. While the union has been trying to get management to focus on fixing the experience review process and agree to the January effective date for pay adjustments, CFPB management has been trying to get the union to address its proposals on changes to the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), including “CFPB Next.” And at the same time, there have been ongoing discussions about reopening CFPB workplaces and related health and safety issues. During these discussions, management representatives have been dismissive of the safety concerns we have raised and have ignored management’s legal obligations to bargain over these matters prior to implementing a Return to Office. It is imperative that these health and safety issues be addressed before offices reopen.

NTEU members share management’s desire to negotiate changes to the CBA and to have new telework, remote work and office space policies in effect before CFPB offices reopen. But rather than work collaboratively with us in getting to the bargaining table on terms that make it possible for union representatives to balance all these important priorities and our own CFPB duties, management has tried to bully us into these negotiations by setting arbitrary deadlines and ultimatums, as was done in the message sent by Deputy Director Martinez last Friday. Such an approach does not engender trust or help the parties reach an agreement. It is not reasonable to expect that the parties will be able to complete negotiations on these issues by April 22, so establishing this as a deadline simply guarantees failure and appears designed solely to allow management to play the “blame game.” Despite these distracting and, ultimately, morale-damaging games on the part of management, NTEU remains responsive to the bargaining unit employees’ desire to negotiate these priorities. As a democratic body, we expect any remote work agreement to be voted on by the union members, which necessitates transparency and trust among employees that the final agreement meets our needs. To that end we are offering a counterproposal on the ground rules that will enable the parties to negotiate these issues in a timely manner and ensure that these changes are in effect when offices reopen.

If your goal is to create a more cooperative and collaborative labor-management relationship and establish workplace policies under which employees will feel respected and valued, then we have laid out a path forward to achieve these objectives. We ask for your support in addressing the issue of the January 1 effective date of pay adjustments, and in advising your management team to work with us to productively resolve the issues relating to health and safety, telework, remote work and offices, so that we focus on what’s best for the Bureau and its employees rather than the ongoing fights, threats, and distracting attempts at gamesmanship.

As chapter leaders we are working full-time on these negotiations until we reach agreement. We are available to discuss these matters with you to make sure you get the most accurate information about employees’ bargaining priorities. We look forward to hearing from you and for the opportunity to work with you and your team on these important matters.

Signed, on behalf of the 1000+ bargaining unit employees of CFPB Union,

Catherine Farman
Web Developer | Technology & Innovation
President | NTEU Chapter 335

Jasmine Hardy
Examiner | Northeast Region
Executive Vice-President | NTEU Chapter 335