Unions urge Obama to mend, not end, current federal pay system

The presidents of the two largest federal employee unions on Monday urged the Obama administration to examine what they called outdated job classifications and career ladders, and to focus more attention on how to elicit better performance from workers before creating a new pay system.

"Let's start this conversation by defining the problem," said National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley during the Excellence in Government conference sponsored by Government Executive in Washington. "People always want to jump to the solution, be it pay for performance, or whatever the buzzword will be six or eight years from now."

Kelley said the Obama administration first should look into why provisions in the General Schedule system allowing agencies to reward top performers have not been implemented effectively. If that system cannot be implemented as intended, another system could be equally difficult to enforce, Kelley suggested.

She said examining agencies' career ladder programs would be a good start. Giving employees a clearer sense of how to earn promotions, and ensuring that all workers know how to advance could create a fairer and more transparent system that would be a strong motivator for employees, Kelley said.

John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said the Office of Personnel Management and federal agencies should consider updating several position classifications to provide employees with accurate information about the skills required for various jobs. He said the union has suggested this approach repeatedly to OPM and would be willing to help implement such an effort.

Both union leaders said some of the negative attitudes toward federal employees held over from the Bush administration need to evaporate for meaningful changes to occur. Gage said federal employees were capable of coming up with significant productivity savings if given opportunities to make and implement suggestions. Kelley said agencies need to focus more attention on rewarding top performers and find more positive ways to handle poor performers, giving them a chance to improve or helping them find jobs more suited to their talents, rather than simply fire them.

Kelley and Gage said they would participate in a conference on pay reform that OPM Director John Berry has planned for September. Gage said he would not be an "obstructionist," despite his insistence that "the words pay for performance are radioactive to us; they're toxic," because of bad experiences some workers have had with the National Security Personnel System. Kelley said she hoped the conference would help identify implementation problems that have plagued previous pay systems.

Both sounded notes of caution on changing the federal personnel system.

"I'm not interested in dismantling anything that's not a core problem," Kelley said.

Gage said the Obama administration was unlikely to make significant progress on a performance management overhaul.

"Talking with the administration, I think they're maybe a little naïve," he said. "With all the things going on, taking on the federal performance management system seems a little much."