Thousands more employees to join new Defense pay system

The Defense Department announced Wednesday that a second wave of employees will enter its new pay-for-performance system starting in October.

The group, known as Spiral 1.2, will be made up of 66,558 nonbargaining unit employees who will depart the General Schedule for the new National Security Personnel System on a rolling basis from October to January. The first group, which included 11,000 employees, entered the system in April.

"One of the things we learned with the Spiral 1.1 conversion is some organizations get ready sooner than others," said Mary Lacey, program executive officer for NSPS. "So rather than say, 'Everyone transitions on one date,' certain organizations will transition over a period of time."

The performance appraisal cycle for members of the new group will begin when they enter the system and end on Sept. 30, 2007. Employees will receive their first performance-based raises in January 2008. The full list of organizations included in Spiral 1.2 is available on the NSPS Web site. The group includes 11,990 employees in the Air Force Materiel Command and 6,604 in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army.

NSPS implementation has been hindered by a successful legal challenge from a group of unions. A judge enjoined the labor relations portion of NSPS, which delayed the pay aspects for employees who are members of unions, in the absence of a new collective bargaining scheme.

The system eventually will govern about 650,000 civilian Defense employees.

Lacey said the lawsuit will not prevent the Pentagon from ultimately implementing the human resources portion of NSPS for bargaining unit employees, which includes broad paybands that provide managers with hiring flexibility, market-sensitive pay raises and strict performance ratings upon which some pay raises will be based.

"Those things aren't going away," Lacey said.

Unions battling the personnel system said the Pentagon's announcement Wednesday is a response to their political success in June, when the House voted to strip funding for portions of NSPS that govern collective bargaining, labor-management disputes, and adverse actions and appeals.

The coalition of Defense Department labor unions that brought the lawsuit and lobbied for that vote -- including the American Federation of Government Employees, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, and the AFL-CIO Metal Trades Department -- is now working on the Senate side.

"They think if they go forward they will have more leverage to work against our NSPS defund[ing] efforts," said Matt Biggs, a spokesman for the coalition. "I think their motives are pretty transparent."

Biggs said moving forward with NSPS for nonbargaining employees is creating a two-tiered personnel system, and offered a solution: "Those 66,000 and those first 11,000 -- that serves as a nice list for us when we go to organize in the federal sector," he said. "That's who we will target."