Comment Number: OL-10510183
Received: 3/16/2005 7:30:46 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:

I am concerned about some of the aspects of the proposed NSPS system. I work at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, RI. For the past few years, we've been under a pay-banding system - the DEMO plan. What concerns me about the NSPS system is that some of the flexibilities and pro-employee aspects of DEMO are being eliminated or mutated in the NSPS plan. For example, right now employees have the right to dispute their ratings with a review board. They can go through their past histories and show work performed over the years compared to past ratings to justify their beliefs that their current rating was too low. This arbitration board can then decide to raise the employees rating up if the employee presents a compelling enough argument. NSPS would eliminate this system. Another unfair aspect of the NSPS plan relates to the cost of living and locality pay. Government employees receive no "Christmas bonus" or "profit sharing" plans. Our raises (if we receive them) are not as large as annual raises / bonuses given in private industry. The annual cost of living adjustment is generally larger than the performance based pay raises we receive, and our locality pay is larger than both combined. To take away (or otherwise restrict) financial stipends that are supposed to adjust for the costs of living where we live flies in the face of what cost of living and locality pay are supposed to do. We should continue receiving these based on the fact that we live and work where we do. Finally, it is unfair to RIF personnel solely based on wither the brach or project on which they work. As employees, we have very little control over the projects on which we work. Even if we request to be put on a different project, we are often denied. To face the possibility of losing our jobs just because we were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time is a great way to create more stress at the workplace. If the intent of enacting the NSPS system is to make the federal workforce more like that of private industry, then it will drive federal workers away. Why keep working for the government when we can deal with the same problems (no guaranteed cost of livign / locality pay, constant possibility of job loss, etc.) in the private sector? And, if we switch to the private sector, we can probably make more money and have better benefits (better 401K, profit sharing, better health insurance). I feel that NSPS will actually weaken the federal workforce by causing the true knowledge base to leave and go somewhere else.