Employee group: Reinvention means discrimination

Federal personnel systems designed to protect against discrimination are being slowly dismantled by government's reinvention movement, argues a new report from Blacks in Government.

The report, "National Partnership for Reinventing Government: The New Spoils System?" analyzes the effect of personnel management reforms on racial minorities. It singles out popular trends such as pay-banding, direct hiring and pass-fail performance reviews as reforms that promote favoritism and discrimination in the federal workplace.

"NPR would eliminate the very rules and procedural constraints on government managers that are designed to strengthen accountability and fairness in the exercise of government authority," concluded the report, released Thursday at a BIG legislative policy conference.

According to BIG, recent personnel reforms lend themselves to favoritism because they give federal managers more discretion in hiring, promoting, transferring, classifying and compensating employees. Direct hiring, the group argues, makes it easier for managers to favor their friends, unlike the traditional system of ranking and selecting potential employees based on their qualifications.

Pay-banding, under which job classifications are widened into a few broad categories with increased salary ranges, could result in two employees getting paid different amounts to perform the same job, BIG officials said. Pass/fail systems were criticized for reducing the role performance reviews play in reductions-in-force (RIFs).

In one example, a Commerce Department demonstration project using a pass/fail system awarded 80 percent of RIF credits to white employees, 13 times greater than white representation in the workforce. The Office of Personnel Management "knowingly approved this pay-for-performance system that ignores merit principles and puts many racial minority groups at risk when operating in a RIF climate," the report said.

Conference speaker Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., noted that Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints have doubled during a period of the largest ever federal downsizing, a trend she said provides evidence of systematic discrimination. BIG echoed Norton's complaints in its report. The EEOC lacks enforcement authority, the report said, allowing agencies to "freely do what they want" about discrimination complaints. However, recently finalized regulations will make EEOC decisions legally binding for federal agencies.

Agencies need more accountability so new personnel regulations aren't used to promote racial bias, BIG said. The report made several recommendations for preventing discriminatory practices, including making one person at every agency responsible for diversity management, collecting data on pay-band levels and RIF credit distributions, and punishing supervisors with records of discrimination. Finally, the group recommended, agencies that are the subject of class-action complaints alleging racial bias should not be allowed to use alternate personnel systems.