OPM employees continue job competition winning streak

With victories in two small public-private competitions, Office of Personnel Management workers last week maintained their unblemished record of protecting agency jobs from outsourcing.

"Not only did federal employees win again, but the American taxpayers win as well," said OPM Director Kay Coles James, who announced Monday that a nurse and three blue-collar employees held onto their positions after a three-month streamlined competition. The four employees demonstrated that over a five-year period, they would likely perform their jobs for $521,100 less than the government contractors offering comparable services.

OPM employees will face several more significant job competition decisions in the coming months. By August, OPM expects to announce the results of a larger competition involving 163 full-time clerical, technical and administrative support positions.

The personnel agency also plans to finish up six smaller-scale contests in late April and early May. These competitions will involve mail services, computer network management, benefit administration, accounting, and billing and collections work. Because fewer than 65 positions are at stake in each of the six competitions, OPM will follow the Office of Management and Budget's streamlined procedures for the contests.

In early March, OPM extended the deadlines for three of the smaller competitions by 45 calendar days to allow in-house teams to form "most efficient organizations" and vie for the work, as directed by language in the fiscal 2004 omnibus appropriations act. Agencies covered under the Transportation-Treasury portion of that law (including OPM) must let federal employees establish most efficient organizations in all public-private competitions involving more than 10 jobs.

Some of the competitions under way at OPM involve work that should not be considered for outsourcing, said John Zottoli, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 32, the union branch representing OPM employees in the Washington area. For instance, some of the federal workers with jobs at stake in the streamlined competitions prepare policy documents and sign documents on OPM's behalf, Zottoli said.

Some workers vulnerable to outsourcing advise federal employees on retirement benefits, Zottoli said. "These are matters central to OPM's business," he explained. "We can't have a contractor here [working] with policy experts."

OPM managers went through "a very deliberative process" for deciding which positions to include in the competitions, said Clarence Crawford, the agency's associate director for management. "We went [over] each [position] just to make sure that these jobs were suitable and appropriate for competition."

Officials are still in the process of defining the nature and scope of the work at stake in the standard competition, and are considering taking a few of the 163 positions slated for study off of the list, said Ronald Flom, a senior procurement expert at OPM. Such an action is not uncommon at this stage in a competition, he said.

To date, federal employees at OPM have a perfect track record of prevailing in job contests. Officials announced in late October 2003 that roughly 900 part-time federal employees who administer civil service tests on behalf of agencies and the military won a public-private competition.

Job competitions promote "excellence," James said in her statement applauding the results of OPM's latest streamlined competition. "OPM employees are excellent and ready to compete with the best."

Even though federal workers have prevailed in all of the OPM competitions so far, Zottoli said he is not pleased with the agency's competitive sourcing strategy. "It's a lot of work, and it's largely a waste of money," he said.

Crawford and Flom acknowledged that competitions do take time, but said OPM has hired consultants to help federal workers in the larger competition for clerical, technical and administrative support jobs.

The limited statistics collected on competitive sourcing show that federal employees generally fare well in contests against the private sector.

For instance, data released recently by the General Accounting Office indicated that in-house teams held onto 84 percent of full-time jobs placed up for competition with the private sector at the Defense Department and five major civilian agencies in fiscal 2003. In fiscal 2002, in-house teams retained three-quarters of positions placed up for bids at the six departments.

These figures exclude federal jobs lost to the private sector through direct conversions, where agencies outsource work to private companies without holding a competition. Federal employee union officials also noted that the GAO numbers are not recent enough to provide any meaningful indication of how government workers will hold up in competitions conducted under OMB's May 2003 revisions to Circular A-76.