Sue Thatch: A Champion for the Federal Workforce
Champion – (Noun) a person who fights or argues for a cause or on behalf of someone else.
We spent a lot of time thinking about this one: Who is someone you view as a champion for federal employees, and why? There are many legislators on both sides of the aisle, in both chambers of Congress, we could have chosen. We thought about committee staff and agency officials, both career and political. We thought about winners of the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal winners, past and current; all worthy choices. We decided on Federal Managers Association’s (FMA) own Sue Thatch, a federal manager at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, NC.
Sue is an example of how an everyday, unassuming federal employee can be a champion for the federal workforce. To us, she represents how each and every federal employee can make a difference without fanfare or self-aggrandizement. She represents what it means to be a champion and illustrates the caliber of FMA’s membership.
As the Production Support Logistician (PSL) Team Supervisor at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, in North Carolina, Sue Thatch has demonstrated her exceptional supervisory skills and extremely competent ability to organize, coordinate, and verify the mission has been completed. She has built, supported, and defended the PSL team of which she took the reins as supervisor in 2013. She is trustworthy, honorable, knowledgeable, efficient, and follows through with her commitments.
Throughout her career of government service, Sue has earned a sterling reputation among her subordinates, peers, and leadership at the Fleet Readiness Center (FRC) East. You know Sue hears you when you speak to her and you walk away confident she will do everything in her power to help you.
This was demonstrated on the national level most significantly in her push for legislation to provide additional sick leave to disabled veterans newly hired to the federal government. As a manager, she saw men and women at Cherry Point with combat- and service-related disabilities struggling under the lack of leave available for new employees to attend medically necessary appointments for their chronic conditions. Sue took her idea to FMA chapter leaders, national leaders, the FMA national office, and the halls of Congress. She worked tirelessly to help draft and advocate for the resulting bipartisan legislation, the Wounded Warriors Federal Leave Act, which was signed into law (Public Law 114-75) on November 5, 2015.
This law created disabled veteran leave, whereby an employee who is a veteran with a service-connected disability rating of 30 percent or more from the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) of the Department of Veterans Affairs is entitled to up to 104 hours of disabled veteran leave for the purposes of undergoing continuing medical treatment. Eligible employees receive the appropriate amount of disabled veteran leave as of the employee’s first day of employment as use-it-or-lose-it leave.
Why is this important? There are more than 634,000 veterans who are now federal employees, approximately 31 percent of the total federal workforce. Veterans have training, skills, and experience that is often unparalleled when put to use when they continue to serve the country as a federal employee. Providing disabled veteran leave helps to make the federal government a model employer, attracting selfless heroes who choose to provide further service to the American people. It gives these employees a chance to accrue regular sick leave and still be able to make their appointments to address their service-connected ailments. When the Wounded Warriors Federal Leave Act was introduced, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would help more than 45,000 disabled veterans in its first five years.
And all of this came to be because of a humble federal manager named Sue. She identified and argued for a cause on behalf of someone else. She is a champion for federal employees and her achievements will forever stand, long after she retires, as a key benefit for America’s disabled veterans.
Sue Thatch continues to provide a work environment that meets the needs of both of management and labor, and her future ambitions are to “continue to help coworkers and the fleet as much as I can with whatever they need.”
The column from FMA is part of the FEDforum, an initiative to unite voices across the federal community. The FEDforum is a space for federal employee groups to share their organizations’ initiatives and activities with the FEDmanager audience.
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