MD. Governor issues troubling order

Under the guise of revamping Maryland’s public corruption and misconduct procedures, Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr. issued an executive order requiring state employees to disclose their involvement in any legal proceeding or legal process.

“The vagueness of the order implies that all personal civil proceedings, such as divorces, would have to be disclosed,” says George Myers, president of the Maryland Professional Employees Council (MPEC), an affiliate of AFT Public Employees. “We hope the intent is to eliminate corruption in government and not to impose unnecessary requirements to disclose personal and private matters to Big Brother.”

“People from top management on down are saying ‘It is none of your business’ if the legal proceeding does not deal with an employee’s job,” says Don Trent, an MPEC steward at the Baltimore County Assessment Office.

In response to an MPEC inquiry, the Ehrlich administration says it interprets the order “as requiring disclosure of only those proceedings which are ‘work-related.’” However, no policy clarification has been forthcoming, Myers notes.

David Strom, AFT’s in-house counsel, says that legal matters irrelevant to employment or employees’ ability to do their work “should be confidential and private.”

The order is just one of several outrageous Ehrlich positions. In January 2003, the newly inaugurated governor refused to honor negotiated contracts between the state and its employee unions. (At press time, MPEC was awaiting a hearing before the State Labor Relations Board over the matter.) And in February, when Annapolis, the state capital, and surrounding areas were snowbound, Gov. Ehrlich “told people to stay home, yet we had to use our own leave or not get paid for those days,” Trent says.

Bush shamelessly seeks privatization

Protecting the nation’s public infrastructure—nuclear power plants, dams, bridges and so on—has been a high priority since Sept. 11, 2001. Even security at most U.S. airports has been taken out of the private sector’s hands and turned over to federal employees at the Transportation Security Administration. So why is Congress, at the prodding of the White House, opening the door to privatization of our nation’s air space, currently monitored by federal employees?

President Bush began laying the groundwork for air traffic control privatization in June 2002, issuing an executive order that stripped air traffic control of its “inherently governmental” designation, which opened the door to what the administration calls “public-private competition.”

This summer, concerned lawmakers secured language in both the House and Senate versions of FAA reauthorization legislation that would block air traffic control privatization. But according to news accounts, Republicans on the conference committee succumbed to White House veto threats and removed the language.

The White House Office of Management and Budget says about 416,000 jobs are eligible for public-private competition, meaning those jobs have not been designated as inherently governmental nor deemed inappropriate for competition.

At press time, the compromise bill minus the anti-privatization language was pending in both houses of Congress.

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