INTERVIEW ORGANIZING AT EPA
An Interview with J. William Hirzy J. William Hirzy has just completed a term as president, and is now a vice president, of the National Federation of Federal Employees. He is an employee of the Environmental Protection Agency, where he is senior scientist/chemist in the risk analysis branch of the Office of Toxic Substances. Hirzy signed on with the EPA in May 1981 and worked the previous 19 years for the Monsanto Company. Multinational Monitor: What is the National Federation of Federal Employees? J. William Hirzy: A group of us got together back in 1981 and began talking about the potential problems we faced as professionals [at EPA]. We were facing the election of an incoming president who was a stated foe of environmental protection as we understood it, and he had appointed someone to administer the agency who shared that philosophy with him. Someone who, in fact, viewed EPA staff as the enemy. We felt that we had better get ourselves organized to deal with this oncoming crunch. We discussed a variety of ways of doing that, including forming a professional association. We rapidly realized that the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 provided some legal leverage and protection for us if we formed a labor union so that's what we did. MM: Were EPA employees unrepresented until then? HIRZY: Professionals were unrepresented at that point. The non- professionals were represented by American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 3331. The professionals had voted several years before, when AFGE 3331 had conducted its organizing drive, to stay outside of that organization. MM: Why did they vote against it? HIRZY: I was not there, but they probably felt that they didn't need representation. We've had difficulties getting huge masses of people to sign up- -we have just under 200, or 20 percent, of the bargaining unit here, which totals about 1,200 professionals. We represent all of them, but just under 200 pay dues. There are a variety of reasons people give for not joining, such as, "Gee, it's awfully expensive," "I can take care of myself," or "I don't see what good a labor union can do for me." Professionals by nature or training tend to identify more with the management types in that their careers can lead directly into management. Many of them feel that if they become recognized as a union supporter, it may [negatively] affect their chances of becoming a section or branch chief or of moving into the management chain. There's a whole host of reasons why professionals tend to be tougher to bring into dues paying membership of a union. MM: So you started your union in 1981? HIRZY: We started our organizational work in 1981, [but] it was 1984 before we finally conducted the representational elections here and won our right to be the exclusive representative of the professionals. MM: What were the main issues around which the union organized? HIRZY: The reason we organized in the first place was that we felt this incoming administration was going to be antithetical to what we thought the ethical practice of our professions would be in environmental protection. We basically staked out some turf and said, "We believe in the ethical practice of our sciences for the sake of enforcing the laws that Congress has passed for environmental protection." That's the ground we staked out--professional ethics and professional excellence in environmental protection. MM: Did you believe that your professional standards were being threatened? HIRZY: Absolutely, because of the stated perspective of the Reagan political point of view. We have run into any number of problems in which we have seen partisan politics get in the way of the ethical practice of our professions. It first happened in 1985, when we got wind of an agency move to back off from regulating asbestos. We did a little digging and found out that the reasons given [for the change] were spurious. The reasons given were that they found a section of the toxics law that said that the agency couldn't regulate [asbestos;] they had to give the problem to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. This reason was patently false, and everybody here knew it. As it turned out, we got involved in helping to promote a congressional investigation [on this issue] which brought out the fact that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had called EPA's deputy administrator in and said, "We aren't going to approve these regulations." Very few [people] understand that OMB, in fact, controls the regulatory agenda of the United States and that there are no regulations promulgated in the United States without OMB approval. It turned out that OMB was responding to secret meetings that had been held with industrial interests and others to which EPA was not a party, and which [the agency] in fact had no knowledge of. The result of all that was a change in the way OMB and EPA relate to one another so that there are no more secret meetings like that, and that was a great coup for us. The ruckus that we raised [over asbestos] caught the attention of some people who were interested in [the] drinking water standard process for fluoride. By April or May of 1985, we had a request from a guy who wanted to give a seminar on fluoride toxicity. The seminar was a very eye-opening experience. I had not been involved in any way, shape or form with fluoride toxicity. I, like everyone raised in the 1950s, thought fluoride was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But lo and behold, this guy starts laying out published scientific work showing that fluoride is mutagenic; that it has other toxic properties; and then he pointed out the discrepancies between the information he had and the scientific support document that EPA was bandying about to support its proposed changes for drinking water standards for fluoride. The EPA proposed doubling the amount of fluoride that would be permissible in drinking water. Naturally, this was a real wrench to us. The first thing we did was to write a letter to then-administrator Lee Thomas saying that we heard this seminar and found it very disturbing. We asked to have the people who prepared the EPA's scientific document give us a seminar also to see their side of the story. We basically ran into a brick wall. That was also very eye- opening. We are still at war with the agency on this. At the time, there were two kinds of drinking water standards. One was a science-based standard that said, "This is what science teaches us." The law said that that level had to be set. Then the actual standard that was proposed for drinking water distribution facilities could be looser, depending on social and economic factors. We don't argue with the agency's political right to set the other standard whatever they want to set it, but when they start talking about what science teaches, that's our turf, not the politicians' turf. They got into our turf and were using fraudulent science to try to create this impression that there's no problem with fluoride. As it turns out, there's a big problem with fluoride. MM: Have scientists been intimidated or harassed? HIRZY: We had a fellow here named Dr. Stanley Buckser, who first noted the problems with a tin compound that was used as an anti- fouling agent in marine paints for ships and was killing off marine organisms. It turned out that this stuff was killing oyster larvae and other kinds of beneficial organisms at extremely low levels. [Buckser) began to raise this issue within the Office of Marine and Estuary Protection in the Office of Water at the EPA. He was told to cool it and not to raise this problem because the Navy was very interested in being able to use this material in the paints since it was a very effective anti-fouling agent. Then, they fired him. We got involved in trying to fight that through the arbitration process. The arbitration took months and cost $50,000. [And in the end,] the arbitrator believed management. The arbitrator wouldn't allow evidence from supporting witnesses from Stan's side. The arbitrator sustained the firing. It was a terrible travesty of justice. MM: Is the current EPA administrator, William K. Reilly, friendly to your union? HIRZY: Reilly is sort of the public relations guy. Henry Habicht, the deputy administrator, is running the agency. We are waiting for a chance to talk to him about our recent problems with the agency. EPA is trying to kill us off right now because we have instituted a program of professional ethics. They are imposing [requirements] on the new union president, Dwight Welch, and the new president-elect, Myra Cypser, requirements that have never been placed on people holding those two positions--namely, that they cannot be on 100 percent union time at their discretion which had been the practice since at least 1987, when I was in my first term as president-elect. About a month ago, the agency's personnel people, headed by Mike Hamlin--we believe at the direction of Charles Grizzle, a former Bush regulatory reform staff person who is currently assistant administrator for administration--orchestrated a move requiring Welch to spend at least 80 percent of his time doing agency work, with virtually no time allowed for union work. We tried to negotiate a change in the way we handle official time. I wrote a memorandum last October asking that the agency give us six full-time positions for union work and a bank of hours. The problem was a legitimate one on the management side. They weren't really sure about how much time they could call on us to perform EPA work. We proposed setting aside these blocks of official time. They came back after about six months of "studying the problem" and said that they would give us one-and one-half full-time positions, which was totally ridiculous because we had justified about ten positions. They've been trying to choke us off because we've done a lot of work, talking to the media who ask us what's going on at the EPA that the union is interested in. For instance, the fluoride case was a big one. When we couldn't solve the problem in-house, we eventually went public with it and drew a lot of attention. When we had the toxic carpet incident at EPA headquarters, we got national media coverage [as well.] We eventually got [the carpets] removed about 18 months later. The real zinger here was that we drew national media attention, and the union's telephones started ringing off the hook with people calling from around the country saying "The same thing happened to me at work or at home." We began to see what a major problem this was and started raising some cain about that. The agency didn't like that in a big way. MM: Now administrator Reilly has announced that he is establishing a panel of outside experts on the role of science at EPA. Isn't that a good thing? HIRZY: Yes, at far as it goes. It's an excellent thing to have recognition of the fact that there's something wrong with the way science is practiced here at EPA. That is clearly a step in the right direction. Our concern is that Mr. Reilly directs the panel to talk to people other than high-level management types. If they only talk to those high-level management officials, absolutely nothing good is going to come of it because those people are put in the position not for their expertise and practice of science, but because of their ability to comply to some political agenda. That's the problem with science at EPA. It is far too often bent to the needs of some political agenda. MM: What has been that political agenda for the past several years? HIRZY: It's basically been make sure that nothing bad happens to American industry. I frankly believe that a legitimate regulatory program at EPA could be quite beneficial to American industry if there would be some creative thought put into it. For instance, insurance rates could be lowered if industry demonstrated compliance with certain kinds of regulatory practices. There are many good things that could come to industry if an ethical, scientific program were instituted at EPA and not this narrow political agenda. Unfortunately, the same kind of thinking that all too often guides industry is guiding the political interest here, namely what the bottom line is going to look like in three months, four months or six months. As long as I'm showing a profit in six months or a year from now, I don't have to care what the long- term implications are. That's precisely what the problem is. There has got to be some longer-term thinking, both here at the agency about what this means for the agency's practice of science, and in industry in terms of long-term viability of American industry against foreign competition. We have to start thinking beyond those three-month, six-month, or one-year bottom lines to what's going to be the long-term viability of these enterprises when we have to face the competition that the Japanese, the Germans and the Taiwanese are bringing against us. It's not necessarily going to be detrimental to industry to be performing in a more ethical and environmentally sensitive way. MM: Are the average EPA administrators clearly interested in protecting the environment, or do they adhere to political rules? HIRZY: My sense is that most of the people think they are really doing something good for the environment within the political constraints they are operating under. Most people here recognize the massive nature of the political bureaucracy and the difficulty in changing any of that. If you're in the management chain, you are pretty much bought into the U.S. political system. You are in the direct, linear chain of command from the president. And when the president says do something, it gets done. The reason the union is kind of a maverick operation here is that we have staked out some turf that's outside of that chain of command. We don't challenge the right of the political system to determine what political solutions to put in place, whether it's for the environment or for the national economy, or national defense. Our concern is how our professional work is used in reaching those goals. We stake out a place that says partisan politics has absolutely no role to play. MM: Does your union interact with environment groups? HIRZY: To some degree. We tried to file anamicus curae brief for a lawsuit that the Natural Resources Defense Council brought against EPA in the fluoride drinking water standards setting back in 1986. We were unable to get that in because Judge Robert Bork threw us out. Most of our work here has involved much more grassroots types organizations. We haven't been involved all that much with the big groups, although we did participate in a blueprint for the environment exercise which was run by the Sierra Club during the presidential campaign of 1988. We had a section put in asking for certain kinds of programs to be established at EPA, a code of ethics for instance, which is another thing we are asking the science panel to look at. We are literally in a fight for our lives right now with the agency. We have asked those people who have contacted us regarding the fluoride or toxic carpet issues to contact administrator Reilly and ask him to stop trying to cut off our union time and prevent us from interacting with the public. Response letters from the EPA, signed by Grizzle, are saying that the agency is not trying to do any of these things. The letter that went back to Senator Brock Adams, D-Wash., accuses us of representing private parties like the National Toxics Campaign Fund or the New York State Coalition Against Fluoridation. Their evidence is that these people have written and lauded us for providing them with information. This is a knockdown drag-out fight to the death with Charlie Grizzle and Mike Hamlin. They go or the union goes. I just sent a letter to the [Congress] saying that these letters from Grizzle are full of lies, and we want Congress to investigate this because they are basically accusing us of committing a felony when they say we're representing private parties on official time. Our concern is how our professional work is used in reaching [the political] goals. We stake out a place that says partisan politics has absolutely no role to play.