In this insightful episode, Senior Editor, Eleazar Weissman (MPP’ 24) engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Randy Erwin, the National President of the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE). Listen and learn about the intricate landscape of federal employment, with a special focus on the challenges encountered by wildland firefighters.
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Eleazar Weissman
All right. Well, again, it’s really nice to meet you in person. I wanted to get started by asking you to talk a little bit about your career, how you got started. And yeah, if you could just start with that.
Randy Erwin
Okay, well, I’ll first say who I am. I’m Randy Erwin. I’m the National President of the National Federation of Federal Employees, where a union that represents 110,000 federal workers nationwide, we got workers about 50,000, at Defense about 20,000 at the US Forest Service, we got the nurses, doctors and healthcare professionals at 50 VA hospitals and outpatient clinics across the country, and in about 35 other federal agencies across government. So how did I get here? Interesting. You know, I never thought that I would be doing what I’m doing. I went to Georgetown University as an undergraduate and went to the business school, McDonough School of Business, and graduated with a degree in marketing and management. And I was going to be a consultant. So I thought, that’s what I’d be doing. And my senior year, I had a big job lined up with PricewaterhouseCoopers, at that time, considered a pretty good job right out of school to be a consultant. And week before my start date, I got laid off. And so I had had the job lined up for eight months. And then I kind of got the rug pulled out from underneath. My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, was going into her senior year at Georgetown, she was at the School of Foreign Service. And you know, just about start her senior year when that happened. And she said, I was from Miami, Florida, she said, Just get back up here doesn’t get back up to DC, You have friends, you can crash on couches, until you find something and, you know, because I didn’t have a way to even to get an apartment or anything like that. And in my industry consulting, which I thought was gonna be my industry that nobody was hiring either, you know, the tech bubble had burst. And so there weren’t a lot of opportunities at that time. So I went to temporary agencies, and I said, Give me the best temporary to permanent job you have out there. And I got an opportunity to come to the National Federation of Federal Employees. And I came in there, my interview was September 11th 2001. That was the day of my interview, that interview got canceled. But a few days later, I interviewed and I started on the 21st of September that year. And I was a temp answering the phones, you know, you would call the NFFE headquarters, I would answer the phones. And then, you know, three, three years later, or three months later, I became the assistant to the national president. It was his assistant that had had moved on and why would they need a temporary worker in the first place. But I was just kind of in the right place at the right time. And I didn’t hardly know what a union was, you know, when I, when I came to NFFE, I didn’t know much about the federal government, for that matter. You know, we’re a government union that represents the government workers. But you know, I did want a permanent job very bad and, like get apartment, and establish myself. And so, so that’s how I got started. And then from there, I just kind of took advantage of my opportunities, I kind of felt like I was at the right place at the right time, I’ve benefited from some really tremendous mentors, who kind of saw some potential in me and helped me. About two and a half, three years in, I became NFFE Legislative Director and Chief advocate on Capitol Hill, and the public spokesperson of the Union. So I was kind of very much kind of public facing, and, and trying to, you know, to advocate for our members in any way possible. And, and so I kind of cut my teeth and built my reputation in that role. And then, and then, but anyway, from the day I walked in, as, as a temporary worker, you know, 15 years later, almost, you know, almost exactly, I became National President of the Union. And so, it’s a great little ride. But, uh, but it’s, I’m really honored and blessed to be doing what I’m doing.
Weissman
How was it for you to adjust to some of those new responsibilities? Like, what were some of the highlights for you?
Erwin
career highlights maybe? So a few of them stand out, I would say I would say one of the very biggest is getting a pay increase for wildland firefighters. So this was just a couple of years ago. There’s a bipartisan infrastructure package that got worked its way through Congress, it was signed by President Biden. And in it, they, you know, wildland firefighters had been have been woefully underpaid for a long time. You know, if you know, the GS system, they’re mostly GS threes, fours and fives, which is very low on the federal pay scale, they were starting at $13 and change, when in a lot of places where they work. In California, for example, the minimum wage was higher than $13 change. So I mean, it was for the kind of work that wildland firefighters do. They’re being paid peanuts, and not a living wage. So that was a major problem. But in this infrastructure package, we got for wildland fire, federal wildland firefighters nationwide, we got an increase of 50%, up to $20,000 per year. So for most wildland firefighters, they got a $20,000 Pay bump, and it was much needed and life changing for them. And so, you know, that was only for two years. Since then, you know, for the for the last like, three, four months, we’ve gotten that that pay increase extended, you know, into this fiscal year, we’re finally into the kind of the next fiscal year after it expired, but it’s a thing where we think Congress is going to kind of keep that going, we’re optimistic that they will eventually make that permanent. We think that that’s an easy, right policy decision to make. And there’s a few hurdles that we have to get over to make it happen. But we really do need to make that happen. But getting that done the first time was really a huge thing. It was life altering. And, you know, for anybody who was impacted by that. And, you know, it was it was it was it was real nice when we were able to get this thing called the National Security Personnel System repealed, this was a big thing that was going on, you know, during, during the Bush administration, and into the Obama administration, where back after 911, in 2002, they were kind of using 9-11, as a pretense to take away collective bargaining in the federal sector. And first they did it when they created the Department of Homeland Security, they establish it and took away collective bargaining rights for the most part. But and then they then they went to Congress said, Oh, this is working great, we should do the same at Department of Defense. Well, Department of Defense is about a third of the federal workforce about 700,000 civilian federal workers there. And they passed legislation in 2002, to do away with collective bargaining rights in the Department of Defense, with the plan in mind to make it government wide, shortly after. So that was really kind of an existential fight for the existence of, you know, federal employee unions. And, you know, and we had to fight and win that. I mean, if we lost the ability to bargain and defend workers in the federal sector, you know, it would, it would really hurt the workers themselves who we represent. But it would also fundamentally alter the way our government works for the American people. You know, as it is, there’s this never ending desire to starve the beast and squeeze federal workers, for example, they make 26 and a half percent less than private sector workers doing the exact same jobs. You know, so there’s this kind of constant pressure, you know, in squeezing federal workers, we saw it, nobody hurt worse than wildland firefighters. But it happens throughout the federal government. And so if we went away, they’d never see another pay increase. Again, their pay would be frozen, and the quality of government service would go down and down and down. And federal workers are doing such important work for the American people, caring for our veterans, keeping our military ready, keeping our air water safe, protecting our borders, protecting our national health, and national security. So the work they do, everybody loves the work that individual federal employees do, for the most part, they like those missions. And that’s why those missions, you know, Congress has never had an appetite in all the cuts that have occurred, they’re not saying we’re gonna get out of the business of this or that. They never do that. But they do kind of squeeze the existing workforce in various ways. Try to whittle away at pensions, try to give them a pay increase that doesn’t keep pace with inflation, and over time, turns into just, you know, a worse and worse job where you can no longer recruit and retain the best and brightest and what the American people deserve. So, you know, being able to in 2002, they passed NSPS to take away collective bargaining rights. It took us all the way to 2010 to repeal that and have collective bargaining rights restored. And now you know, you never know what threats are gonna come down the down the line. But for now, you know, federal workers have collective bargaining rights, and they’re not currently under threat. Yeah, a couple other things is, you know, in the last couple years, our union has experienced 25% net growth. So, you know, for us that, you know, membership is our bread and butter, it’s the lifeblood of the Union. It’s what makes everything that we do for our members possible. And 25% is a number that we’re very, very proud about. So that’s, that’s, that that’s a, you know, something that I’m proud of. And so is everybody else here in NFFE
Weissman
Absolutely. So, you spoke a little bit about your career trajectory, and how you didn’t really anticipate on joining a union, you didn’t know, even you know, was really and then you know, now you’re leading one of the largest ones in the country. And, but I so I want to, like I guess, move on to like, what you think, and you mentioned the wildland firefighter issue as well. But I was curious, if you believe that is like the current biggest issue that needs to be solved, or what other sort of labor issues you view right now as like priorities for federal workers.
Erwin
Where you sit is where you stand. Now, we have a lot of wildland firefighters. And that’s a that’s major issue for us. I do think that it’s significant nationally, because it is one of it’s one of these places, these areas where people don’t realize how bad the problem has got. They don’t really realize it until there’s a huge fire that’s not being put out. And there’s smoke everywhere. And bad news is all over all over the news. But unlike everyplace else in government, the you can’t do business as usual in the Forest Service, because the problem has grown exponentially with climate change, or let’s say at least correlates with climate change. Right? Right. I’m not sure I overstated here, but right. And so fire seasons have gotten much longer, they’ve gotten much more intense, the problem is just bigger. But when you kind of kick the can down the road kind of approach which Congress has had with not passing appropriations, but continuing resolutions and those sorts of things. In other agencies, it’s not the end of the world, sometimes, you know, it’s kind of like, Okay, a little nibble here, is manageable. In the Forest Service, when the problem is, it’s going up exponentially the problem, you cannot respond that way. And so that’s what we’ve had, we’ve had a couple decades of the problem, you know, jumping off the page, you know, and how bad things have gotten with no, no corresponding response from Congress, or policymakers. And so we don’t have nearly enough money in the budget. We don’t have nearly enough boots on the ground. Those that are like many have already reached their breaking point and left. You know, folks that are those boots on the ground with you know, a wildland firefighters, everybody left, what’s left is teetering, or the majority of them are. And they’re just continuing to get squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. And so we really need some kind of new deal for how we handle wildfire in this country. But it really all starts with paying the wildland firefighters better, the very first thing we need to do is pass legislation to this Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act is this piece of legislation that we’ve been pushing, and it would make that that that 50% or $20,000 pay increase permanent and really take away the kind of insecurity that most federal wildland firefighters have. We were up lobbying on Capitol Hill, we flew a bunch of our wildland firefighters into town last year. And there was one who is on a hotshot crew, which is an elite group of wildland firefighters, kind of like Navy Seals of wildland firefighters. So not just your average, but the best. And typical hotshot crew has 20 members of it. And, you know, she reported to Capitol Hill until the White House and other places that on her hotshot crew of the 20, there were 12 that because of their financial situation, we’re living in their cars. And that we cannot that that is not right. That is not humane. It’s not fair by a mile. And we just got to do better in this country. And we can’t expect to be able to contain wildfire. In the end. If we don’t have wholesale change. People will stop working for the federal government, for the Forest Service. We won’t have the boots on the ground that contain wildfire, communities are going to burn and people are going to die. And people have to understand that those really are the stakes. And we’re getting there, but we’re not quite there yet.
Weissman
You summed that up really well. It was incredible. I guess so in the interest of like, making progress requires a bipartisan sort of support a lot of times to get these sorts of bills passed and these policy decisions made. How do you manage these bipartisan relationships? How do you manage advocating for issues for wildland firefighters for, within this very polarized complex system?
Erwin
Well, you know, I’m proud of the lane that we’ve carved out, because it’s, it’s hard to do, and aren’t many people who benefit from this. But, you know, we believe we’re the most bipartisan you get in America, and we do work equally with both Republicans and Democrats. And that can be hard to do sometimes. And but you know, we’ve done it by one, never crossing any member of Congress off the list, in terms of who are we going to continue to try to build relationships with and, and, you know, continue to try to drag in your direction, to kind of see the light on what federal employees are doing. And so, you know, we’ve done that over time. And even if you can’t say, let’s say, you know, right now we’re pushing for talks about federal employees pay 26 and a half percent less than what eat people, people doing the same jobs in the private sector are making, that’s not sustainable, we got to do better than that, we got legislation called the FAIR Act to get 7.2% raise this year, that would put a little, little dent in that pay gap, not a lot, but kind of, you know, close that gap just a little bit. That’s the legislation that we’re, you know, have been kind of lucky to get any, say, Republican co-sponsors on that legislation. We got one last year, we were very happy to get one, you know, and it’s bipartisan like plate, right. But so even if if, you know, we’ve got members that live in a Republican congressional district, even if you can’t get them on that, at least get them to care about the issue of the federal employees that they actually have in their district. So if it’s a defense base, they have, okay, you know, get them up, find some common ground there, that we got a forest or a park or whatever it is, get them to understand and see the benefit and the value of the work that their their constituents are doing as federal employees, because it’s very easy to just broad, brush it and go, you know, federal employees are all lazy bureaucrats in Washington, well, that’s not really the case, you got 85% of federal workers that are not in the DC area. They’re spread out throughout the country. And they’re doing very valuable work for the American people exclusively. And so when you see a member of Congress, they go, Oh, well, I don’t I don’t like I don’t really like all this, these bureaucrats or whatever. But I like my federal employees, almost every single one of them will say that, you know, the ones in my district are fine. Well, everybody’s saying that, okay, you know, so in order to to have these bipartisan things, you gotta cross nobody off the list. And the other thing is, you got to call balls and strikes fairly consistently. And, you know, that is hard to do when politics is inserting itself. So you really got to do all you can to kind of get above politics, and really focus on advocacy and policy and legislation. And but then, you know, calling balls and strikes fairly. I’ll give you a good story. Mitch McConnell, you know, from from Kentucky, he was the Senate Majority Leader. Well, a few years ago, there was a big government shutdown, lasted 35 days, our members were, you know, had missed two paychecks. And we’re getting to a point where they were really starting to feel the pain of this extended government shutdown. And you know, we had to kind of there’d been legislation that would pass out of the house to end the government shutdown. And there was something about like, 80, Senators had indicated that the House version came to the Senate floor that they would vote for it. So they would vote to end the shutdown. And Mitch McConnell would not bring for a period of time was refusing to bring that to the floor. Well, we, you know, we’re very hard on Mitch McConnell in that era, you know, where we sit is where we stand. And even though we’ve had a relationship with Mitch McConnell, in this instance, he is not bringing this to the floor and our people are starving. And, you know, he’s at the center of that. I was on CNN four times, you know, screaming from the rafters that we did Mitch McConnell to bring that to the floor to end the shutdown, eventually the shutdown ended. Okay. And about three months later, there was the President Trump, his administration announced that they were going to shut down the suit Civilian Conservation Centers, which are which are, which is part of the Forest Service, what they do is they train at risk youth in trades, it’s a very valuable thing, a very good return on American on taxpayer dollars. It’s a great thing, a great program. And they were just going to shut down the federal civilian conservation centers that do this work, it was our members that do that training. And we had to, you know, 1200 members who are gonna lose their jobs, there were about 28 or 29 facilities across the country that we’re going to close. We had worked with Mitch McConnell for years in protecting this program. He was the only state that had three Civilian Conservation Centers in his state. So we went to Mitch, we say, hey, Mitch, I’m paraphrasing here, but you know, sorry about the, you know, things but the shutdown, you know, we know how it goes. But we have been working for you a lot with you for a long time on the Civilian Conservation Center issue, you know, your state is more impacted than any other. And we really need a letter to President Trump to say, Hey, what are you doing, like, abandon this idea? He wrote that letter. And after that, I went out there, and was praising Mitch McConnell for taking that action. And I took a lot of heat, and that’s caused that’s calling balls and strikes fairly, you know, where some, they would kind of get to that step and not go praise Mitch McConnell, you don’t, because whatever for labor person say, Hey, this guy hasn’t been done, have a great labor record? Well, he did the right thing in this place. And this is, you know, and so I said, so I went out there and praise them and said, Hey, thank you for standing for the Civilian Conservation workers in Kentucky. And if you don’t do that, why would any member of Congress do anything for you ever again. And if you want to really have bipartisan alliances, and anything meaningful that you ever want to get done, has to be bipartisan, if you’re only working with one side of the aisle, you’re only going to get crumbs, if you can get something done with both sides, you can actually get something done meaningful. And so. So that’s been our approach, and it’s worked for us.
Weissman
That was really great. So moving forward, can you and you sort of just actually kind of beat me to the punch with giving a great example of a partisan approach. But I guess, my next step is, you know, you’ve talked about your career, you’ve talked about the issues in the field, and you’ve talked about some strategies that you’ve utilized for overcoming some division in the country. I guess, my next question would be, what advice you have for, you know, current students, maybe graduate students, people who are entering the workforce for moving forward and, you know, getting involved in maybe Union work or the public policy field of labor relations.
Erwin
So I think the first thing is to really find what it is you care about, and do whatever it takes to be doing that full time, get your foot in the door, you want to work for labor unions, get a full time job with a labor union, and then find a way find a way to make a difference once you’re there. Or sometimes you’d have to parlay and begin your career, sometimes it’s not working. For me, I started working at NFFE. And this is literally the only jobs I’ve had in college, I’ve had different roles, but I’ve been working for the same place. So that’s blessed and lucky for them. But you know, you get your foot in the door, get in the door and be working full time, then it’s important to really understand your industry and be looking for the ways that we look for the gaps that aren’t filled. You know, find a niche that might work for you that you are void of that you can fill in, have a niche and add value. And understand what out there on a macro level, like, where’s this industry going? What aren’t people seeing, understand your industry and understand how to add value. And then then you just have to get after it. I mean, it’s work ethic, it’s related, definitely relationships, building relationships, that again, bipartisan relationships, don’t just don’t just make sing to the choir and make friends with people who are already friends, you got to get you got to get bipartisan, getting a diversity of friends. And then another major thing is be willing to accept half a loaf. Because that is how change is incremental. It does not happen wholesale very often. And so you get half a loaf, and then you go for another half a loaf, and you go for another and another and another and another. And when you ended up at the end of it, you’re like, wow, we’ve really made some progress here. But it does. It very rarely happens in open a big in one fell swoop. So you got to take it bit by bit and make change over time incremental. Okay.
Weissman
Yeah, that’s great advice. And just to close And I know, we’ve we’ve moved sort of faster your career and through all the policy areas, but I guess I would, I would more give you like a little bit of space to talk about what you hope to see happen in the future?
Erwin
Well, the, it just really irks me the way people talk about federal workers across the board. They’re doing such tremendous work for the American people every day. But they’re not shown that respect. That was not always the case. You know, a couple decades ago, Republican and Democratic administrations showed respect for the federal workforce and career civil servants that are doing great work. And that has to change back. We can’t, we can’t, I mean, first of all, it’s their kind of perpetuating myths in order to kind of paint federal workers in a bad light that is a little bit tied into, you know, trying to trim budgets and things like that, who knows why they’re doing it, but it has to stop. And I think the only way to do that is to kind of, for federal workers themselves, through their unions, because there’s not really another, you there’s no other groups out, there’s a few federal employee unions like NFFE. But you know, if they got to stand up with their unions, and command, their respect, nobody’s given respect, you got to take respect, you got to command it. And the thing is, they cut truth on their side, federal workers do and, and so, you know, we need to stop the bashing, we need to earn our respect back by standing up to our unions and demanding it from the American public from our leaders. But we need a critical mass. I mean, that’s to change people’s perceptions, is a hard thing to, it takes a multi decade plan, and execution and messaging and kind of, you know, one problem is a lot of organizations are bureaucracies and bureaucracies are, when they’re shrinking, like a lot of unions are getting smaller, they don’t have they don’t have enough money to do the things they want to do, or know that things that they need to do long term. They’re just trying to keep the lights on and keep people from getting laid off. And you’re, and you’re being short term and in your thinking, and the things that you should be doing well, we need to change that. And so if we can get back on the upswing be growing our organizations and being strategic about how we’re spending our money, and how we educate the public about the work we do in the federal government and the role that unions play, then we can change the way people think. But until we start moving in that direction, and I think we’re starting to, but we got a long way to go. You know, and that’s what I want to see change. I want federal workers to be respected. And people not have the inherent mistrust of government. That doesn’t make sense. It’s kind of they’re not it is an irrational fear of government, not that people shouldn’t be skeptical of government or be critical of the role that government has to play. Those are fine. But the things that are irrational based on fallacy, you know, mistrust of federal workers just because they are a federal worker, that stuff doesn’t make any sense and needs to change. So I’d like to see if that’s the direction you’d like to see things go.
Weissman
Yeah, that sounds great. Well, I really appreciate you setting aside the time today to speak with me.
[Outro]
Established in 1995, the Georgetown Public Policy Review is the McCourt School of Public Policy’s nonpartisan, graduate student-run publication. Our mission is to provide an outlet for innovative new thinkers and established policymakers to offer perspectives on the politics and policies that shape our nation and our world.
