| Comment Number: | OL-10505895 |
| Received: | 3/11/2005 9:29:37 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:
The NSPS is wholly unnecessary. What is the purpose of revamping the system? 1) To save money- This can only be done at the expense of employees salaries or benefits. Given the number of impending retirees, DoD can simply not hire as many new employees or consolidate redundancies. New hires salaries are less than the retirees, and retirees can always be hired back as consultants without benefits. It seems that the effort is to eliminate pay parity between military and civilian employees. 2) flexibility - Congress has the discretion of closing bases and reorganizing as it sees fit. NSPS can not force an employee to continue working in a new location. DOD Civilians have always willingly performed our jobs in hazardous locations where the work can not be performed by contractors who will not tolerate the risk to personnel and equipment. Just as the Military is an all volunteer force that answers the call to duty, so is the civilian workforce. 3) Hiring and firing - If anyone is naive enough to think that 100% of your workforce is working 100% of the time, then he has not the slightest clue of management. There will always be underperformers, and it can be made clear to those employees that they are not meeting the standards and will be dismissed. It happens today and does not need an overhaul of the system to get rid of a few bad apples. 4) pay for performance - traditionally women and minorites are paid less than thier counterparts in the workforce. The current GS system minimizes the possibility of this phenomenon. What safeguards are put in place when your pay raises are at the sole discretion of your immediate supervisor? Is each and every supervisor going to be educated and presented the "mile high view" of the new system? it seems that this is an attempt to make it easier to squeeze people out, as in private industry. Given the amount of training, and the time it takes to get a security clearance, is it wise to foster transience in the government workforce? 5) collective bargaining - minimizing our ability to bargain collectively... what more can I say? You want the fox to guard the henhouse. Personally, if a coworker makes a little more than me or a little less, it is a small rice to pay for the transparency that exists throughout the DoD. As individual employees, we have the ability to budget, and plan how far our pay will take take us. we may not be the highest paid employees in the country, but under the current system, we can get a cost of living increase at the minimum and get on with our jobs. The GS system keeps quite a bit of politics out of the office. The NSPS is an attempt to remove any rights we might have as employees under the nebulous promise that we might get a substantial pay raise (at the expense of others in the department, I might add) under the new "pay for performance" . Leave us with the predictability and transparency of the current system and let us get back to work.