Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) labor-management relations, focusing on: (1) the basis for TVA exemption from federal labor relations laws that apply to most other federal agencies; and (2) alternatives for improving TVA labor-management relations.
GAO found that: (1) TVA employees collectively bargained with TVA management through TVA policy rather than by law; (2) under TVA policy, its employees and their unions have such advantages over other federal agencies covered by labor relations law as the ability to bargain for wages; (3) although the TVA bargaining structure includes some provisions common to federal labor relations laws, TVA employees and their unions lack basic rights and protections that are guaranteed under law to employees in most other private and federal organizations, including the statutory right to collectively bargain and use certain avenues for resolving disputes; (4) TVA labor relations deteriorated in the past decade due to unions' beliefs that the collective bargaining process was inadequate; (5) unfavorable economic conditions caused TVA management to reduce and realign its work force and take a stricter bargaining position, causing management and unions greater difficulty in agreeing on pay and other proposals; (6) union representatives believed that TVA management unfairly used its bargaining position to obtain concessions by threatening to cancel bargaining agreements when negotiations became stymied; and (7) union representatives believed that petitioning to Congress or the courts was the only recourse for resolving negotiation deadlocks.
