NTEU Troops Blitz Congress Seeking 3.8 Percent Pay Raise, End to Sequestration

Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, has a voting record that scores 100 percent approval from the National Treasury Employees Union. So it was no surprise that she brought hundreds of members to their feet when she told NTEU’s legislative conference on Tuesday that “I stand with you.”

Taking aim at the now-dominant Republican view that “government is the problem and must be cut at every turn,” Hirono said: “My perspective is the government is part of the solution. It is not the answer to all of our problems.  But I see government as a force for good that can create a level playing field and opportunity for men and women to succeed.”

The senator delivered opening remarks to the union’s four-day gathering that, under the theme “Building a Stronger America,” adopted as priorities adequate agency funding and stopping sequestration, fair federal pay, protecting federal employee retirement, Customs and Border Protection staffing and funding, and employee rights in the federal workplace.

Hirono called the Republicans’ only-partial funding of the Homeland Security Department in protest of President Obama’s immigration executive order “another manufactured crisis” that, if not resolved with a clean bill in the next 24 days, will precipitate a real crisis in border enforcement.

The president “is right to establish prosecutorial priorities,” she said, rather than deport 12 million undocumented people. Those comments drew cheers from NTEU members in the audience who work for Customs and Border Protection.

Recounting that she came to Hawaii as a girl “in steerage” when her mother left Japan to escape an abusive husband, Hirono also pushed for immigration reform. “I know what it’s like to experience poverty and wage uncertainty,” she said, noting that her mother joined a union and sometimes went on strike. “I have been a government employee for 30 years,” she said, adding that in Hawaii, 13 percent of the workforce is government employees, second only to the District of Columbia and Maryland.

NTEU President Colleen Kelley in her keynote blasted sequestration for leading to “furloughs, hiring freezes, [and] a drastic scaling back of employee training.” The across the board budget cuts – set to return in fiscal 2016 under the 2011 Budget Control Act – have “shackled agencies in myriad other ways,” she said.  “If Congress does not adequately fund our agencies, we will fail in our efforts to deliver on our missions, period.”

Reporting that NTEU had expanded with almost 1,700 additional members in the past year, Kelley said much of the union’s legislative work had involved blocking “bad bills” that harm morale through such proposals as hikes in retirement contributions.

She singled out the Internal Revenue Service for suffering five consecutive years of budget cuts totaling $1.2 billion. The agency is on pace to lose 16,000 to 17,000 employees total when fiscal 2015 ends. “The roof is caving in at the IRS,” she said. “Only 43 percent of taxpayer calls will be answered this filing season and wait times will stretch to a half an hour or more. It is shameful.”

President Obama’s fiscal 2016 budget released on Monday proposed raising IRS funding by 18 percent, to $12.9 billion.

Kelley also said that the cumulative 2 percent pay raise the federal workforce has received over the past five years is “well below the 6.3 percent increase in private-sector pay for the same period.”

NTEU will be buttonholing lawmakers this week to press for a 3.8 percent pay hike in calendar 2016 contained in the Democratic-sponsored Federal Adjustment of Income Rates (FAIR) Act (S. 164 and H.R. 304) .

Kelley remarked upon this month’s fifth anniversary of the death of NTEU member and IRS employee Vernon Hunter, killed in Austin, Texas, when an irate tax protester crashed a private plane into IRS offices. And she led a moment of silence in anticipation of the 20^th anniversary on April 19 of the domestic terrorist bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 federal employees and children in the building’s day care center.