Union rejects latest SEC pay parity proposal

A final plan offered by the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle a dispute with union officials over employee pay raises still falls short of what is needed, according to the National Treasury Employees Union.

"That is hardly the result for SEC employees envisioned by Congress when it approved pay parity legislation last year," NTEU President Colleen Kelley said in a statement released Tuesday. NTEU represents about 2,000 SEC employees.

Agency officials lobbied for pay flexibility because they were losing key employees to the private sector and to other federal agencies, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, where employees could earn more money doing the same work. In January, Congress gave the SEC the authority to create its own pay system.

When union and SEC officials could not agree on how to structure the new pay system, SEC moved forward and implemented its own system in May. Days later, NTEU asked the Federal Service Impasses Panel to step in and resolve the dispute. NTEU and SEC each submitted final offers to the panel last week and a decision on the pay parity issue is pending.

Kelley criticized SEC's plan, contending it "does nothing to alleviate the pressing recruitment and retention problems facing this vital agency, which were, in large part, the impetus for congressional approval of pay parity legislation."

Under the SEC pay system implemented in May, most employees get a 6 percent base pay increase, plus locality-based increases. Employees in hard-to-fill jobs, such as attorneys, accountants and compliance examiners get larger increases. Managers are paid 6 percent more than non-supervisory employees at the same pay grade. The new pay system also eliminated within-grade pay increases at the agency. Instead, managers have more discretion over who gets pay increases each year.

That last point means employees would spend their time "building their performance portfolios rather than doing the work of government" in an attempt to qualify for future pay raises, according to NTEU.

"This is really only a thinly veiled attempt to shift the burden of having to write appraisals from managers to employees," Kelley said.

SEC officials had no comment on the latest development, but when the new pay system was adopted in May, agency Chairman Harvey Pitt said that he had "insisted that every penny that is available for pay parity be utilized for the maximum benefits of this agency, those it serves and its employees."