In December 2022, the Data Liberation Project submitted a FOIA request to the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) seeking:
- Database records describing the general characteristics of all FMCS-tracked work stoppages.
- All documentation of FMCS-0004, the “system of records” containing that information.
In February 2023, the agency’s FOIA office responded with a “partial grant,” providing just one documentation file, and withholding all other records.
The Data Liberation Project has uploaded that file, which is an Excel spreadsheet named “Prod Schema.xlsx”. Although FMCS did not provide any context for the file, it appears to be the database schema for the agency’s case management system, or at least a portion of it. It’s fairly detailed, with 5,900+ columns across 100+ tables.