Online calculator lets federal employees recompute their salaries
A new online calculator allows federal employees to figure out what their salaries would be under a 10-year-old law designed to close the pay gap between the public and private sectors.
The online tool, featured on the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Web site, calculates how much an employee's salary should be under the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA). FEPCA was supposed to close the pay gap between private sector and federal salaries.
Under FEPCA, the annual federal pay increase is calculated by subtracting 0.5 percent from the annual change in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Cost Index (ECI) and then adding a locality adjustment. The ECI measures changes in private sector costs of wages, salaries and benefits.
The Clinton administration never fully implemented FEPCA, because administration officials did not believe the FEPCA formula produced accurate estimates of the gap between federal and non-federal pay in localities around the country. Instead of endorsing FEPCA-formulated raises, the Clinton administration used a loophole in the law to simply added one percentage point for locality pay after subtracting the 0.5 percent from the Employment Cost Index.
At the center of the FEPCA formula debate was a survey, the Occupational Compensation Survey, used to compare public and private sector salaries in metropolitan areas across the country. The Occupational Compensation Survey was discontinued in 1998 after budget cuts at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Instead, the bureau combined the old survey with the ECI and another survey to form a new National Compensation Survey.
Federal employee unions say the new survey does not accurately calculate the pay gap, especially for employees on the lowest rungs of the General Schedule.
Therefore, the AFGE calculator uses Office of Personnel Management data based on the old Occupational Compensation Survey to calculate locality pay. OPM is able to provide data based on a survey that no longer exists by "aging" the data, similar to adjusting it for inflation.
The calculator allows an employee to plug in his or her geographic location, grade and step level on the government's General Schedule. The calculator takes that information and computes how much the employee's salary would be if FEPCA had gone into effect with locality adjustments in 1994.
For example, an employee at the GS-13, Step 7 level in the Washington metropolitan area currently makes $75,857. According to the calculator, if FEPCA had been fully implemented since 1994, the employee would now be taking home $85,423--a difference of $9,566.
According to Peter Tchirkow, a compensation specialist at AFGE, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is refining its National Compensation Survey, so that OPM can use it next year to calculate locality pay adjustments. Tchirkow said OPM is using the Occupation Compensation Survey for locality pay adjustments because the National Compensation Survey contains flaws and cannot be used to accurately calculate those numbers.
"The improvements [to the National Compensation Survey] will make information more reliable, so we can start using it for locality pay comparisons," Tchirkow said.
AFGE, the National Treasury Employees Union, and others have pushed for full implementation of FEPCA for the past seven years. In January, AFGE and NTEU sent President Bush a letter asking for a meeting to discuss the law.
"One big reason for the federal human capital crisis is obvious each time anyone uses AFGE's FEPCA calculator," said AFGE President Bobby L. Harnage. "If the government is serious about recruitment and retention, Congress should start right here."