Nearly 1,000 Panama Canal Commission employees have accepted buyouts as part of a streamlining effort before the Dec. 31 handover of the canal to the Republic of Panama, according to commission officials.
The commission, which manages the 50-mile waterway that links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, will become an autonomous Panamanian agency at the end of the year under the terms of the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty.
David Ballenger, an attorney at the commission, says the agency reorganized "to get lean and mean" in preparation for its handover to Panama. The agency offered buyouts to 987 employees and sent 60 reduction-in-force notices during a three-month period last year.
Buyouts were offered at 50 percent of an employee's average salary with a maximum of $25,000. Of the RIF notices, 25 were reassignments and 35 were changes in grade. No separations resulted from RIFs and no more buyouts will be offered, Ballenger said.
The Office of Personnel Management published interim rules last week that give priority consideration to 7,000 former Panama Canal Zone employees now searching for federal jobs in the U.S. The rules apply to employees who received RIF notices, but who have not already been appointed to another federal position in Panama.
Displaced feds are generally entitled to selection priority in their local commuting area under federal rules. But OPM is making a special rule for Canal Zone employees that entitles them to priority when applying for vacant positions throughout the continental United States.
In order to be eligible for special selection priority, employees must have held a job since March 31, 1979 in the Panama Canal Employment System.
U.S. bases in the area of the Canal Zone have gone through their own streamlining process and are down from more than 10,000 troops earlier in the decade to about 4,000 today.
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