Many of our members work long hours at tasks which require using the smaller muscles of the hands and forearms. Through no fault of their own, they can acquire a repetitive strain injury, such as carpal tunnel syndrome.

Unfortunately, exactly that happened to one of our members, who had to go on long term disability as a result. It was a hard struggle, but finally she was up to working again. Of course, with her injury, she would require considerable rehab and time to get her manual dexterity back to the level it had once been.

Management, in its wisdom, decided she could come back to work, but only as a clerk with typing duties. She told them that typing was not something she could do very well right now, but if they could put up with her typing at 15 words per minute or so, she would try to do the job.

Fortunately, the work consisted of doing more than typing, so she found that over the course of the day, she could still get a lot of work accomplished. But that wasn't good enough for management, who fired her.

Again, the union was forced to go all the way to arbitration to win a decision which should have been plain common sense in the first place. Our member was rehired, with back pay. HHS wasted another $10,000 or so on an arbitration case they had no hope of winning but more than that, management sent a clear message to its long service employees: you're only as good as your last work day.

Luckily, our member belonged to a union. Had she been forced to go to the government or to a court to get her job back, chances are she would not have bothered. Maybe that's exactly what HHS has in mind...