HHS agrees to include union members in bonuses

The Health and Human Services Department will begin paying out performance-based awards to all its employees after reaching an agreement with the National Treasury Employees Union on Friday to include its members.

"I am pleased we were able to settle this matter so hard-working, high-performing HHS employees are not delayed in receiving their earned awards," NTEU President Colleen Kelley said in a statement.

"We're pleased we have an agreement with NTEU, and we're pleased that we can begin the process of providing the performance awards to all those NTEU-covered staff who work very hard," Bill Hall, an HHS spokesman, said.

HHS announced two weeks ago that it would begin paying performance awards to nonbargaining unit employees. The agreement between the department and NTEU stipulates that the percentage of employee salaries earmarked for performance awards will be the same for employees in NTEU's bargaining unit and workers who are not union members.

HHS' operating divisions independently determine the percentage of salary budgets that will be used for performance awards.

The bonuses are only part of a larger contract negotiation between HHS and the union. NTEU already has said it will accept the department's performance evaluation system, which forms the basis for the awards.

Those evaluations were scheduled to be completed by Feb. 15, with award announcements on March 31. HHS does not yet have figures available for the size of the awards or the number of employees who will receive them.

Because negotiations are ongoing, the specific language of the performance award agreement is not yet publicly available. NTEU said an arbitrator is scheduled to report on other issues at stake in mid-April.

Kelley said she hoped negotiations would move more quickly now that the performance award portion has been resolved.

"Many [of the contract issues] already have been settled," she said.