Victor Ashe says treatment of contract employees by BBG executives amounts to abuse of the system

BBG Governor Victor Ashe and VOA Director David Ensor meeting with VOA China Branch employees - BBG photo

In an open challenge to Broadcasting Board of Governors executives who can’t stand him, BBG member Victor Ashe told the Knoxville News Sentinel newspaper (“Victor Ashe advocates for contract workers“) that some contract employees at the Voice of America (VOA) have been working there 18 to 25 years. “To me, it’s an abuse of the system. They are not represented by unions or an association,” Ashe said.

Ashe explained that “contract employees generally are hired for short-term purposes or it’s some special needs services,” he said. But to his dismay, he said, he found 45 percent of the workers for Voice of America were contractors.

Despite resistance from BBG executives, Ashe was able to force them to change their policy and grant free flu shots to contract employees so they would not infect the rest of the workforce. He is now pressing the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) director Richard Lobo, a presidential appointee whose wife is a contributor to President Obama’s electoral campaign, to address the larger issue of unfair treatment of BBG contractors.

Lobo kept the management team responsible for some of the discriminatory policies. The IBB/BBG management team has been rated in government-wide employee satisfaction surveys as having the worst managers among all federal agencies of similar size. Lobo gave all of these managers performance bonuses, some as high as $10,000 on top of their $150,000-$170,000-plus salaries. Even managers responsible for contract employees not getting paid on time, with some delays lasting several months, received these monetary awards, which Lobo defended in a memo to all employees as justified.

BBG and IBB executives are not used to public scrutiny and have developed an agency reorganization plan, which they intend to present to Congress, that would limit public and Congressional oversight and allow them to manage U.S. international broadcasting more like a private corporation. Sources tell us that they are not used to having a former elected official and public servant like Ashe meeting with rank-and-file employees and asking probing questions.

BBG Watch sources tell us that at least some of Lobo’s executives continue to resist Ashe’s efforts to improve transparency and accountability at the agency, as do some of Ashe’s colleagues on the BBG who also find his meetings with employees and public comments unnerving.

Ashe is a former Republican mayor of Knoxville and a former U.S. ambassador to Poland. According to our sources, two Republican BBG members S. Enders Wimbush and Dennis Mulhaupt frequently oppose Ashe’s initiatives, as do some but not all Democrats serving on the board. Ashe was able to compromise to some degree with the outgoing BBG Chairman Walter Isaacson. Richard Lobo has been mentioned as Isaacson’s possible replacement.

In speaking with the Knoxville News Sentinel reporter, Ashe mentioned our website BBGWatch.com and our efforts to call attention to the problem of long delays in BBG payments to contract employees. But, according to our sources, another BBG member lashed out recently against our website and tried to get other members to do something about our criticism of BBG officials. We have not heard that BBG members responded positively to this highly unusual request in an agency funded by U.S. taxpayers to promote free speech, media freedom and democracy abroad.

We have noticed that BBG executives have been eliminating lately any references to BBG Watch in their daily media digest about BBG and U.S. international broadcasting which they distribute to subscribers in the U.S. and abroad. It will be interesting to see whether they will include the Knoxville News Sentinel story about Victor Ashe and his campaign to improve employee morale.

UPDATE: We have just received the BBG media digest and the Ashe story was included. Good for BBG.

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