WE CHANGED OUR NAME TO

EMPLOYEES FOR EXCELLENCE

We still advocate efficiency.  This web site is produced by BPA employees for BPA employees.  BPA however does not sanction or support this web site in any way.

WE NEED A CAPTION FOR THIS PICTURE!

SEE OUR CAPTION CONTEST: CLICK HERE

FEBRUARY 9, 2000

• Read what the Wall Street Journal says about the RTO.  Click Here.

• The AFGE had its regular monthly meeting today.  Members heard about the meeting BPA's Employee Transition team had with union representatives.  We can expect BPA to release a document outlining a set of principles that will govern the treatment of employees in the transition into an RTO.  The AFGE will be providing factual information on the RTO on its website.  You can get there by clicking here.

• We have prepared an essay on the RTO.  Click here.

FEBRUARY 8. 2000

• We now celebrate this web site's first anniversary.  One year ago we got together to oppose the management's attempt to take away our Title 5 protections in proposed legislation called the Administrative Efficiencies Project (the AEP).  Our mission was to keep employees informed of what the management was doing.  Recently, we heard that the AEP died.  We did not sponsor a funeral for it, although that might have been a good idea to convince some of us that it was gone.  We did however retired our old web site, but if you want to look at it for nostalgia, click here.

• The AEP might be gone, but the management's desire to 'restructure' BPA isn't.  Incidentally, when you see a word in quotation marks, it means it is a code word, or euphemism for something far less appealing.  'Restructuring' is a euphemism for downsizing.  The justification for 'restructuring' is usually 'competition' or 'efficiency'.  We now face a much bigger challenge than the AEP in the Regional Transmission Organization, or RTO.  It appears that the BPA management has learned their lesson well from the AEP which was a specific proposal.  The RTO will involve wholseale changes, but to date there have been no specific proposals.  It is much harder to object to something that has no specifics attached to it, but is shapeless, amorphous, and presented as an endless set of possibilities.  It seems that the management will try to hide their agenda until an opportune moment when everyone is asleep, and the can push it through unopposed.  We see our job as staying awake, and keeping people informed on the inclinations of the management and possible outcomes of the ideas they are considering.  Our goal is to preserve as many, if not all the protections and benefits we have currently as Federal employees. 

• There are other euphemisms we have heard recently--privatization, regionalization, and the like--all of which mean DEFEDERALIZATION.  This seems to be the route that the management envisions to achieve the same effect they wanted from the AEP.  If BPA is defederalized, we will no longer be Federal employees.  The management already has a euphemism to deal with all the issues relating to how defederalization will affect employees.  They call such issues Employee Transition issues, or ET for short.  Nobody seems to know what we are transitioning into, but we already have a term for it.  The management recently had meetings called 'Focus Groups' to listen to what employees want, and to gauge the level of awareness employees have of what the management is doing.  So far, their agendas remain safely hidden from employees.