From the bottom ranks of the General Schedule to the top cadre of the Senior Executive Service, groups that represent civil servants before Congress have one thing on their minds: Better pay.
"We have three priorities: Pay, pay and pay," said Senior Executives Association President Carol Bonosaro, who represents the federal government's highest-ranked employees. "It gets exacerbated every year that Congress doesn't deal with it."
National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) President Robert Tobias, who represents rank-and-file feds, couldn't agree more.
"Our goal for the 106th Congress is the same as for 105th, and that is to focus the Congress on the tremendous federal employee pay gap and have Congress come to grips with the fact that in order to attract and retain a qualified and dedicated workforce, it has to pay for it," Tobias said.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the Federal Managers Association and the Professional Managers Association all echo the call for better pay for federal employees, saying it is their top legislative priority when the 106th Congress convenes in January. Of course, pay and benefits protection always has been a key issue for federal employees' groups.
"It's a never-ending battle to make sure federal workers are protected and their benefits are protected," said Hydi Miller, legislative director for the Professional Managers Association.
AFGE and NTEU, the two largest federal employee unions, will focus on reducing the pay gap between private sector and federal sector employees, union representatives say.
The current method for determining annual pay raises is governed by the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA). Under the law's formula, federal pay raises for the past six years would have closed the pay gap incrementally. For example, the pay raise for 1999 should be 13 percent under the pay formula.
But the Clinton Administration has never trusted the FEPCA pay formula. Each year since the law went into effect, President Clinton has cited a loophole in FEPCA that permits him to set lower pay raises than the formula recommends. Clinton plans to give federal employees a 3.6 percent raise in 1999.
"Some members of Congress have reached the breaking point of having President Clinton ignore the law every year," said Diane Witiak, an AFGE spokeswoman. "We think we'll see some movement in pay next year." Witiak pointed out that the 1999 omnibus spending bill requires the administration to report on ways to improve the FEPCA formula. The report is due to Congress by May 1, 1999.
For federal managers groups, a major issue is improving overtime pay for supervisors. Currently, supervisory overtime is capped at one and a half times the pay rate of GS-10, Step 1 employees. The Professional Managers Association, the National Council of Social Security Management Associations and the Federal Managers Association hope to resurrect a proposal introduced in the 105th Congress to lift the overtime pay cap.
"We would love to see overtime pay enacted," said Mark Gable, legislative director for the Federal Managers Association. "I'd say we've got a better than average chance of getting it through."
Meanwhile, top senior executives are hoping that their stagnant wages will see some upward movement next year.
"The top two of the six SES ranks are at the same base pay," said SEA's Bonosaro. "The top two ranks are at the same total pay cap in 21 localities; in three localities they're joined by ES-4 [the third highest rank], so you've got the entire top half of the SES being paid the same in those three areas. The compression is unreasonable."
If Congress doesn't address executive pay, then agencies will continue to seek agency-specific relief from SES rules, Bonosaro predicted. In the 105th Congress, the IRS received special executive pay authority for 40 positions, while the Education Department's student financial aid office received its own executive pay authority as part of the office's transition to a performance-based organization.
Gable predicted that agencies will seek individual relief from Title V, the portion of the U.S. Code that governs civil service pay and benefits. "Agency personnel chiefs would love to be able to escape from Title V," said Gable. "Although once they do, they probably wouldn't know what to do with themselves."
The Office of Personnel Management is working on governmentwide civil service reform proposals, to avoid the continuing agency-by-agency breakdown of the civil service system. The Federal Aviation Administration, the IRS, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and segments of the Defense and Commerce departments have sought and received exemptions from civil service rules. The Defense Department has developed plans to seek broader changes to civilian personnel rules.
Any civil service pay and benefits proposals must move through the House Government Reform and Oversight Civil Service Subcommittee, currently chaired by Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. Subcommittee staffer Ned Lynch said the panel will be sitting down in the next few weeks to discuss plans for the next session. Subcommittee vice chairman Michael Pappas, R-N.J., lost his re-election bid on Tuesday.
A civil service reform package put together by the subcommittee withered in the final weeks of the 105th Congress amid opposition from the Clinton administration and federal employee groups. Lynch cautioned that pay changes introduced next year must be accompanied by performance management reform.
"Any kind of adjustment to federal employees' pay has got to be linked to some kind of improvement in federal employees' performance, improvements in performance management, and improvement in agencies' ability to remove poor performers," Lynch said. Two priorities lingering from the 105th Congress are retirement coverage corrections and long-term health care benefits for federal employees, he said.
Other issues employee groups will focus on in the next Congress include:
- Merit Systems Protection Board appeal rights for Federal Aviation Administration employees.
- The effects of Social Security reform on federal employees and retirees.
- Privatization and contracting out.
- Protecting and expanding health care benefits.
- Higher employee contributions to retirement funds required under the 1997 Balanced Budget Act.
- Additional base closure rounds proposed by the Defense Department.
Federal retirees' groups will also be rallying around benefit-boosting proposals.
The National Association of Retired Federal Employees will continue to seek legislative relief from two pension-reducing laws, said association legislative representative Chris Farrell. The association will challenge the Government Pension Offset and the Windfall Elimination Provision, two laws that the association say hurt lower-income federal retirees. Bills to modify or repeal the two provisions will be re-introduced next year, Farrell said.
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