OPM workers win competitions, will keep their jobs
Employees at the Office of Personnel Management on Wednesday succeeded in defending 45 more full-time jobs against contractors.
Civil servants won three separate public-private competitions conducted using streamlined procedures outlined in the Office of Management and Budget's May 2003 version of Circular A-76, the rule book on job contests, OPM officials announced. The competitions involved 13 mailroom workers, 21 computer network specialists and 11 employee benefits administrators.
The mail clerks demonstrated that over five years, they would cost OPM $769,500 less than contractors offering comparable services. OPM's network management employees showed they could outperform the private sector by $3.3 million in the same time span, and the benefits specialists posted savings of $8.3 million.
These results confirm what OPM officials suspected "intuitively," said Ron Flom, a senior procurement executive involved in running the competitions. To date, civil servants have prevailed in every public-private competition at the personnel agency.
In the three contests, OPM officials required federal employees to form an in-house team, called a "most efficient organization," and submit a plan for performing the work at stake. The fiscal 2004 omnibus appropriations act directs certain agencies, including OPM, to let civil servants establish most efficient organizations in all public-private competitions involving more than 10 jobs.
Several of the mailroom workers with jobs on the line worried that the in-house plan would involve cutting positions. But ultimately, agency managers in charge of shaping the plan decided to stick with the current number of employees, and still came out ahead.
OPM managers also decided that the computer network and employee benefits specialists currently operate with optimal staff levels, and did not recommend any cuts.
The latest job competitions ended on a positive note, but placed employees under unnecessary stress, said John Zottoli, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 32, the union branch representing OPM employees.
"I wear around my neck an AFGE slogan that says: 'Nobody does it better,' " Zottoli said. "And we confirmed that. But we already knew that."
Even through the competitions did not result in changes to staffing levels and the work remained in house, OPM will benefit from having gone through the process, Flom said. The civil servants have signed what amounts to a contract, he explained, and are now responsible for working efficiently on a consistent basis.
Under a quality assurance program, OPM managers will judge employee performance against established standards, Flom said. The assessments will figure into employees' individual performance evaluations. Supervisors will receive performance ratings based partly on the in-house team's ability to live up to expectations.
Every five years, in-house employees will have to re-compete to demonstrate that they should hold onto their jobs, Flom said. The competitive sourcing program will prompt OPM to continuously look for ways to operate more efficiently.
Next week, OPM will finish three more streamlined competitions, and by August, the agency expects to announce the results of a larger competition involving 163 full-time clerical, technical and administrative support positions.
OPM meets the criteria for receiving top marks for competitive sourcing on OMB's quarterly management scorecard, Flom said, and is hoping to earn a "green light" score on the next set of ratings. The administration is due to publish the marks for the second quarter of fiscal 2004, which ended March 31, soon.