| Comment Number: | OL-10502216 |
| Received: | 3/1/2005 11:52:14 AM |
| Subject: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| Title: | National Security Personnel System |
| CFR Citation: | 5 CFR Chapter XCIX and Part 9901 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
Subpart C - Pay and Pay Administration, DoD is giving itself the right to lower overall payroll amounts to less than other federal agencies. If their budget funding is short they will be allowed to pay employees less than other agencies when it comes to locality and cost of living pay increases. This will affect the moral of the DoD civilian workforce and have a negative impact. Employees will receive performance appraisal ratings as they do now but NSPS would allow supervisors to decide how many perfomance pay shares to give to an employee. This means that between two excellent rated employees each one of them may not get the same pay shares. It will be greatly influenced by how much your supervisor likes you. This will cause employees to compete will each other in a negative matter, such as backstabbing. Newly appointed or reappointed employees will be able to start at a pay rate higher than a career employee who has done excellent work for years. Even thought the new or reappointed employees hasn't proven their excellence. Again, the moral of the career employees will be greatly negatively impacted Subpart F - Workforce Shaping, The NSPS seems to place the emphasize on performance and less on veterans preference. In a RIF situation placements rights will be limited to employees within the same competitive list or competitive group. No longer will they be able to bump or retreat to another competitive list or a lower tenure subgroup which will no longer exist. May impact veterans preference. Subpart G - Adverse Actions, The 10 day reply period for an employee to respond to a proposed adverse action notice will run concurrently within the 15 days of the advance notice period. The employees ability to reply ends prior to the proposed notice period. It isn't right to not give employees sufficient time to reply to adverse action charges. Subpart H - Appeals, The appeal filing deadline is shortened from 30 to 20 days. Neither party to an appeal can unilaterally file for addtional time to pursue discovery or settlement. This shortens the employees time to build their appeals case sufficiently if more time is needed. It seems the DoD agency doesn't want employees to succeed in their appeals. Even thought they may can prove the charges are unmerited. Subpart I - Labor-Management Relations, Any provision of a collective bargaining agreement that is inconsistent with NSPS will be unenforceable once it is covered, unless the Secretary allows a particular provision to remain in effect. This gives him the right to cancel any negotiated collective bargaining agreement article that he feels may remotely be inconsistent with NSPS. The National Security Labor Relation Board members will be appointed by the Secretary. That means they will be politically influenced by him and will reduce the labor relation rights of employees and not work independently. There is no provision to consider nominations from labor unions or for them to have a member on the board. In summary, there are some things written within this document that should have been discussed between the DoD, OPM and the labor unions prior to it's publishing on the Federal Register.