Social Security tech workers press for reclassification

Some information technology workers at the Social Security Administration want agency officials to upgrade their job classifications so they can get higher salaries. Systems administrators at more than 142 Social Security hearing offices say their current GS-335 computer assistant classification doesn't reflect the true nature of what they do each day. "We think we should be classified as GS-334 computer specialists," said Larry Long, a hearing office systems administrator based in Seattle. "We do much more than just input data, people are writing programs [and] troubleshooting hardware. It's complex stuff that we do." According to Patricia Lewis, a systems administrator based in North Dakota, the job she and other hearing office systems administrators perform has changed in the 20 years since the job position description was written. "What we do now doesn't bear a faint resemblance to what we did then," Lewis said. Long and some other hearing office system administrators appealed for reclassification to Social Security officials in February 2000. Agency officials denied their request in October. But a spokeswoman for the agency said the issue is still being "looked at internally." The Office of Personnel Management's November announcement of a new IT pay raise was like salt in their wounds, Lewis and Long said. The pay hike, which took effect in January, applies only to certain positions at grades GS-5 through GS-12 in covered occupational series. They are: computer specialists (GS-334), computer engineers (GS-854) and computer scientists (GS-1550). If the Social Security systems administrators had won their appeal, they would have been eligible for the raise. A dispute concerning the IT pay raise for employees of the Naval Air Warfare Center in Orlando, Fla., was recently settled after officials there decided to convert qualified GS-335 employees to the GS-334 series to make them eligible for the pay raise. "We feel we not only have a strong case for our arguments specifically, but in a more general sense, feel there are indications that more accountability needs to be in place on how jobs are classified," Lewis said. In 1999, OPM began revising IT job descriptions after the federal Chief Information Officers Council released a report saying that bridging the pay gap between federal IT salaries and the rest of the marketplace was crucial to attracting and keeping talented government IT employees. "The message [the Social Security Administration] is giving is that there is a shortage of professional IT workers, but they are overlooking the IT workers they already have," said Lewis.