| Comment Number: | OL-10511451 |
| Received: | 3/16/2005 3:32:56 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:
Re: NSPS Comments To whom it may concern, This personnel system is a throw back to another time. It will allow managers to play fast and loose with workers rights. The current Civil Service System was developed to minimize the abuses that the NSPS would encourage. The NSPS treats Civil Servants as the enemy. Assuming Upper Management and the taxpayers are the of a stereotyped and caricatured Government workforce. Paying and rewarding employees from a “pool” of funds will, without question, create a spoils system where the Insiders pay each other off, remove good employees over personality conflicts, and reward loyalty rather than performance. A “Friend of the Supervisor” pay system will be demoralizing and disruptive to our mission. It will set coworkers at odds, competing for wages and bonuses that DOD may or may not fund. Teamwork will suffer, and in our case, the “Corps Family” will become more fractured. This system will create an atmosphere of fear where employees are afraid to speak out about problems in the workplace for fear of, now legal, retaliation. Managers, if so inclined, will have new tools at their disposal to reward cronies and punish those who would speak out by harassing them with unreasonable work schedules and putting their family’s financial wellbeing in jeopardy. Abusive management, harassment, and unsafe working conditions will become common. And with no impartial appeal system, expectations of fair treatment would seem naïve. There are no checks and balances when only DoD appointed Boards hear appeals. NSPS promoters argue that it is needed to recruit good people, reward high performers and fire poor performers. The current system does not prevent management from doing any of these things. The right of an employee to appeal an adverse action to an impartial body may seem “cumbersome” to some managers but for most employees it is there only recourse against abuse and harassment. Rewarding high performers can be accomplished with bonuses (unless budget decisions restrict them) and promoting up the career ladder. Problem employees can be removed if the case to remove them is valid and documented. It doesn’t seem likely that such a system could attract good people to government service. With wages and bonuses funded by DoD, employees will have no confidence that adequate funds will be available to all deserving increases. In the past, the lowest and least of us in the St Paul district got a preview of how such a system would work when money was tight. As a cost saving measure, some employees work season was shortened, not for lack of work, but simply because their contract allowed it. Also, student program workers, employees with the most to lose and the least protections if they objected, had their schedules and work sites shuffled around to avoid paying overtime to more senior employees who declined to work extra hours for comp time. Dean Otterson Representative for The American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO. (AFGE) Local 1441 5168 Cottonwood Lane Lacrescent MN 55947