Dear Bureau Pat,
I was looking at my SF-50, Notification of Personnel Action, and noticed "7777" in section 37, entitled Bargaining Unit Status. What does it mean?
Dear Eligible,
To shed some needed light, the SF-50, Notification of Personnel Action, is a permanent record in your Official Personnel Folder (OPF). It is the required form of notification for accessions, conversions, and separations, and for corrections and cancellations of those actions. The form is also used to document and report all personnel actions except mass transfer and mass change actions, which may be reported by a listing of the employees impacted. Got that? Good. The area on the form related to your question is block 37.
This block identifies the bargaining unit status (BUS - how could it have a government name without an acronym to recall) to which you belong, whether or not you are actually a member of a labor organization. The codes may be found in the Office of Labor Management Relations publication, Union Representation in the Federal Government. The entry must match one of the valid codes contained on the Bargaining Unit Status Code Table. The code will indicate a specific bargaining unit or one of the following conditions:
Two BUS codes that are universal throughout the Federal sector are 7777 and 8888.
- 7777-Eligible but not in bargaining unit.
- 8888-Ineligible for inclusion in a bargaining unit.
A 7777 code identifies positions that are eligible for representation by a labor union; however, no union has been certified as exclusive representative for those employees. A union may seek to represent employees with a BUS code of 7777 through the petition, election and certification process.
While the Federal Service Labor Management Relations Statute provides that employees may form, join, or assist any labor organization, there are some Federal employees that cannot be represented by a union. That exclusion is noted on the SF-50 as BUS code 8888. Positions coded as 8888 include supervisors, management officials, and personnelists, among others.
The Only,
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