| Comment Number: | OL-10505658 |
| Received: | 3/10/2005 11:54:46 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:
Town Hall Meetings were held throughout the world in summer of 2004. How come our Town Hall Meeting (that management would not allow us to go too) was 2 weeks ago? Pay and Pay Administration-Part C: Adjusting Rate Ranges and Local Market Supplements: Current Locality pay is based on a set rate for a location. Increased management and oversite will be required if the rate will differ by career group, pay schedule, or pay band. This creates a more cumbersome system to manage than the current system. The culture of high performance cannot make a logical relationship between locality pay and performance. Locality pay being withheld from employees with an unacceptable performance rating creates an unethical bias-that unacceptable performers can only live in an area without locality pay? This is the same as assessing punative damages for an unrelated action, living in a high cost area should have no relationship to performance. Part C: Performance-Based Pay: The proposed changes are not that radically different than the current performace base pay. No need to change regulations. Those that have an exeptional performance get a bonus now by with-in grade increase, time-off, etc. The current system is much more equitable and manageable than the proposed system. The new system is to cumbersome for supervisors. Allowing supervisors to award different credits for the same performance can be demoralizing. The government can't operate like a corporation based on the fact that the goverment has positions of public trust. In the corporate world, you aren't allowed to talk with other employees about your salary, there aren't restrictions in government. We are free to communicate because of our current and equitable pay system. Anticipate the number of complaints against supervisors will cause low moral and dissent between the workforce with this new system. Performance pay pools: The new pay system creates more management positions. Paying to Manage pay pools instead of realocating funds to create needed positions, recomend the lower positions that were done away with during downsizing. Still need to replenish the clerks and secretaries, whose positions were reduced to nothing and what little slots there are left are still being abolished to support the higher salaries of the workforce. Management is still in dire need of clerical support. Computers were supposed to replace this need and though computers have replaced many functions, the higher salaried employees are still getting bogged down with routine correspondence and filing. The government is now paying higher wages for correspondence and filing, whether electronic or paper. This is what needs to be corrected, not allocating more funds into even higher wages and a more fragmented higherarchy. The current technology-based work force in corporate america is now being called the -white collar sweat shop- in the media. NSPS is formulating a system for government employees bases on these same principles, to turn government employees, who over generations have fought to improve and provide a good example to corporate america on the ethical treatment of the employee, into another -white collar sweat shop-. Other than monkeying with our pay and providing a basis for inequitable treatment by providing an opportunity to cover up descrimatory practices by giving supervisors/managers more control over the pay allocation. With the current system and with-in grades, it compensates for doing the "harder work" without additional recognition, and provides an incentive to keep going when the going gets tough. The set with-in grade increases are an asset, not a detriment. Even though some get by with just doing the minimum and getting periodic increases, that is just one aspect, it also helps keep the middle and top performers.