Pentagon to add 75,000 employees to new personnel system

The Defense Department is planning to transfer an additional 75,000 nonbargaining unit employees to its new pay-for-performance system, according to an online notice posted Wednesday.

The department has been moving its employees to the National Security Personnel System in waves known as spirals. The upcoming round -- Spiral 2 -- will begin this calendar year, with all 75,000 employees transferred to the system by March 2008, Mary Lacey, program executive officer for NSPS, said on Wednesday.

The installment will be split into two waves -- spirals 2.1 and 2.2. The first will have 9,167 Army employees, 8,842 Navy employees and 148 Defense Commissary Agency employees. Spiral 2.1 employees will make the switch by the end of this year, Lacey said.

Spiral 2.2 will occur between January and March of 2008 and will include 18,139 Army employees, 23,029 Navy employees and 15,628 civilians from 13 other parts of the department. Those other organizations include the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Defense Contract Management Agency and the Defense Logistics Agency.

"Organizations have scheduled the date they want to move," Lacey said. "It helps spread the workload and make sure we get all of the training done and all of the classes scheduled properly."

Spiral 2 will bring the total number of employees working under NSPS to 184,159. Spiral 1, which launched in April 2006, has 110,000 employees. Eventually, the system is slated to encompass about 700,000 civilian employees.

Unlike the employees in Spiral 1, those in Spiral 2 will receive the full 2008 governmentwide pay increase, which is expected to be 3.5 percent. The Pentagon announced last month that all Spiral 1 employees will receive half of the 2008 pay increase as an adjustment to their base salary, provided they earn an acceptable performance rating. The other half of the pay boost will be added to performance pay pools and distributed based on quality of work.

Lacey said Spiral 2 employees will receive their first NSPS performance evaluation in September 2008, and the department plans to award performance-based pay increases to the group in 2009. The department has announced plans to allocate the full governmentwide increase to the performance pay pools in 2009.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has delayed moving unionized workers into the system until Congress completes legislation that could defund or repeal portions of NSPS. In May, an appeals court ruled that the department has the authority to limit the collective bargaining rights of its civilian employees through November 2009.

But Lacey said conversion of bargaining unit employees to NSPS is still far off and is largely dependent on the outcome of the pending legislation. The House and Senate versions of the fiscal 2008 Defense authorization bill, which is in conference negotiations, include provisions that would repeal the Pentagon's authority to limit collective bargaining. In August, the House approved a bipartisan spending bill amendment that would block funding for the labor relations aspects of NSPS.

"DoD may not be implementing NSPS for workers who are currently represented by unions, but they may be implementing for those that are eligible to join unions," said Richard Brown, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees. "Two rank-and-file DoD workers who do the same exact job but in different places could have two completely different personnel systems. That makes no sense at all."