Commerce expands pay-for-performance project

The Commerce Department will add 3,500 employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to its pay-for-performance experiment, officials announced Monday.

The employees will join 5,000 fellow Commerce workers who have already left the government's General Schedule for a demonstration project that features broad paybands, performance-based raises and pay-setting flexibilities. The system also weighs performance evaluations more heavily than seniority in making reduction-in-force decisions.

A Commerce spokesman said the agency will review additional organizations for possible inclusion in the demonstration project after the NOAA employees make the switch.

The spokesman said the decision to add more workers to the project comes as a result of an audit by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton showing that "pay is being linked to performance, merit systems are being retained, high performers are being rewarded, performance issues are being addressed and there is no negative impact on employees."

The 3,500 employees include members of several labor unions. An American Federation of Government Employees local union in Miami voted to join the pay-for-performance demonstration after voting several times against it. The change of heart came when a group of employees joined the union specifically to vote for the performance-based system, according to AFGE public policy director Jacqueline Simon.

Representatives from the National Association of Government Employees and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, two of the other unions with locals that voted to switch systems, could not be reached for comment.

In a Federal Register announcement, Commerce Department officials said they were expanding the project to more organizations to "improve the department assessment of the effectiveness…to compete more effectively for high-quality personnel while strengthening the manager's role."

Congress added 3,500 employees to the cap on the demonstration project in Commerce's fiscal 2006 spending measure. That law also extended the length of the project indefinitely.

Before the new entrants were added to the system, some NOAA employees were already in the demonstration project and others still were on the General Schedule, according to the Commerce spokesman. Certain organizations that had served as control groups for the experiment are now being moved in.

Affected NOAA organizations include the offices of the Undersecretary; Program Analysis and Evaluation; Human Resources, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Administrative Officer, and Sustainable Development. Workers in the National Ocean Service, the NOAA Marine and Aviation Office, the Southeast, Northwest and Alaska Fisheries Science Centers, and some offices in the National Marine Fisheries Service also will join the system.