| Comment Number: | OL-10504175 |
| Received: | 3/8/2005 3:49:03 PM |
| 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:
As a Air Force CSRS employee of 30 years seniority, I am compled to comment on the NSPS. Bad Idea! Want more? NEPOTISM! Want a job? Sure Jack, the job'll cost you $2500.00 under the table, wash my car once a week and I will give you the job of this employee who has 30 years of Excellent and Superior ratings. Tork the CSRS employee off enough so he quits? Lets just skip the middleman and contract out the jobs direct. We stripped him of union protection, he has no recourse. Out the door he goes, along with the other 35% of the federal workforce slated to retire in the next five years. And you think you will be able to attract technicians with 20 years experience in infrared technology by giving supervisors a greater authority to recruit? Fat chance! The NSPS system will be a prime reason not to apply for a job with DOD, just the opposite of what you intend. Just as badly as current employees feel about NSPS, word will spread to the new recruits also. Maybe you should change Fat Chance to No Chance. Experence counts! Can you replace a field Engineer working radar systems with a kid just out of school? Who do you want wielding the knife at your next surgery? The cagey vet or the novice? Smart Civil Service employees know the answer. Do you? That is why Step increases are needed. To keep the golden handcuffs of Civil Service operational and provide a basis of pay for EXPERENCE. Not a huge burden, in the final 3 years salary an employee's career it amounts to an additional 1% a year. Gee how did a $650.00 a year pay raise get to be so contentious? If a supervisor finds a bad egg in the batch the solution already exists! Fire them! Document bad preformance and toss them out the door! Deny their step and cost of living raises. These mechinisms already exist in the system. If supervisors are too lazy to manage these employees now, NSPS won't help a lick. This will just give then a bigger stick to wield. Current bonus's of about 3% are being granted for "exceptional" preformers. Employees already feel these are not distrubuted fairly. And you want to tie that corrupt mechanism to 30% of employee pay, and take away the right to appeal with one stroke of the pen? This is NOT the way to encourage preformance. To enable changing a man's base pay on a whim and to denegrate his retirement benifits is not a practical way to motivate the workforce. Speaking of cost of living raise, that is exactly what they are. Not "automatic pay raises". Every employee of Walmart get's a 3% cost of living raise just to pay for the increased cost of gas and housing in the area. Why treat an employee required to maintain a security clearence of Top Secret any diffrently than those at Walmart who have prison records? Fine, use cost of employment factors to adjust locality raises THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN fully funded by law. But to deny a cost of living raise to a good employee just trying to cope with the rising cost of bread and the double digit raises in the cost of heath insurance premimums seems a very bad way to encourage future superior preformance. Pay banding! Lets change a system with 15 clearly defined bands into three broad seperate bands with a variable scale in between each band. We already have the benifits that banding is supposed to acheive. High School Grads are at GS 3-8. Tech and Trade school Alumni From GS 9 to GS 12. Collage grads and experts are from GS 12 to 14. Senior management and Doctoral fall in the GS 13 to 15 catergories. The supervisors of each employess already control the pay by classifiying the job! Isn't that pay banding? We have had that all along! The goal here is clearly not to fund the Raises just as full annual COLA's have never been funded. Want to retain the best and brightest? Don't you think the brightest are smart enough to figure out that NSPS is a Bad idea? Trust me, the best and brightest currently in the Civil Service system have already figured it out. Beware the dog that bites!