--MEDIA ADVISORY--

RICHMOND SOCIAL SECURITY OFFICE SHOWS-OFF IMPROVED
SERVICE TO WASHINGTON LEADERS

Washington, D.C. -- Managers and employees from the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Mint in the San Francisco/Oakland area have stories to tell about saving money and improving customer service as a result of labor and management working together as partners. They will get that chance when they meet with national union and senior Clinton Administration leaders visiting the Bay Area from Washington.

Among the stories to be told: the Social Security Administration's Western Program Service Center in Richmond, California, did some simple tweaking of the way work is distributed, cutting by 25 percent the time it takes to process a claim for old-age or survivor benefits.

Insight into this, and success stories at the Mint and the VA Medical Center in Portland, Oregon, will be given to members of the National Partnership Council (NPC) during its monthly meeting on:

Tuesday, September 12
1:30 p.m. (Pacific Time)
Oakland Federal Building
(Auditorium)
1301 Clay Street
Oakland, CA

The Council is chaired by Office of Personnel Management Director Jim King. Other Council members include Treasury Department Assistant Secretary and CFO George Muñoz, and John Sturdivant, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE). (A complete list of Council members is attached.)

California Federal Employees Speed Service to Customers

Initiated by labor-management cooperation in 1991 and buoyed by the Clinton Administration's commitment to improve service to America's taxpayers, union officials, managers and employees of the Social Security's Western Program Service Center in Richmond, California, took a common-sense approach to unplugging a recurring clog in the work flow.

The Richmond service center processes social security claims for 11 western states and the Pacific Islands. Over the past decade, the population of the United States has steadily shifted westward and been a major cause for inconsistent service between similar claims processing units.

Previously, claims work had been distributed to claims processing units based on the first three digits of the social security number. The first three digits of a person's social security number identify the specific geographic location where the number was acquired. Clogs in the workload pipeline frequently occur when population shifts cause workload imbalances, as had been the case at the Richmond office.

To avoid clogs caused by these imbalances, and speed the payment of benefits to people who have worked hard and earned social security payments, Local 1122 of the AFGE, which represents Social Security employees in Richmond, managers and employees, worked together and came up with a simple solution--distribute the work based on the randomly assigned last four digits of the social security number.

Their solution cut the average processing time for an old-age retirement claim to nine days, down from 13 days in 1993; a disability case now is processed in 15 days, down from 20.

The Richmond Social Security office also is experimenting with an "800" telephone number to encourage claimant contact with the office to expedite business.

The U.S. Mint in San Francisco has developed new procedures, again through partnership activities, for filling orders of coin collectors for special edition coins, saving taxpayers more than $300,000 annually. And, it was within this same spirit of cooperation and the desire to better serve the American taxpayer that the Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Portland involved employees at all levels in partnership activities to improve patient care.

The NPC: A support group for new ideas and accomplishments

Following up on recommendations in Vice President Gore's Report of the National Performance Review on ways to streamline government operations and improve services, President Clinton created the National Partnership Council in 1993. The Council's purpose is to forge labor-management partnerships in government agencies and create a positive work place environment where the cooperative spirits of management and the career civil service unite to improve the delivery of goods and services to government's customers--taxpayers, the business community and other government departments.

To reach this goal, the President gave the Council the lead in promoting labor-management partnerships in executive agencies. In this role, the Council provides information and technical assistance to agencies seeking to establish partnerships.

Partnership is spreading across government. By October 31, 1994, more than 732,000 federal employees from 20 major agencies were working under partnership agreements crafted by management and employee teams with the purpose of improving the delivery of government services.

Media wishing to attend the NPC meeting at the Oakland Federal Building may contact Michael Orenstein at the Washington headquarters of the Office of Personnel Management at 202-606-1800, or Leigh Shein in San Francisco at 415-281-7000.

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Web page created 2 December 1997