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Washington, D.C. — The head of the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees today brought a clear and strong message to a key House subcommittee reviewing pay-for-performance in federal agencies: current experiments with such systems are failing badly; there is no hard evidence the current pay system for federal employees needs to be changed; and any successful pay system must be fair, credible with employees and transparent.

That, said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), is the viewpoint of the tens of thousands of dedicated public servants who are currently on the ground working in government. “These federal employees are the ones for whom alternative pay systems are a looming reality, not an abstract concept.”

The NTEU leader expressed these views to members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and District of Columbia. The subcommittee hearing was titled: “Robbing Mary to Pay Peter and Paul: The Administration’s Pay for Performance System.”

It is vital to understand, Kelley said, that the General Schedule (GS) is the essence of a market-based system, not only structured with rules, standards and evaluations, but providing employees with pay raises based on merit—“which is synonymous with performance and achieving results.” She underscored the importance of having employees “know what their work expectations are, and what they must do to succeed.” This is a key failing of pay-for-performance systems.

In the face of the General Schedule’s successful operation over many years, Kelley argued that ‘there is no hard evidence that the current pay system for federal employees needs to be changed.”

She recounted for the subcommittee serious issues NTEU-represented employees in a variety of agencies have faced with such alternative pay systems; these agencies include the Securities and Exchange Commission, where an arbitrator agreed with NTEU that the system was discriminatory; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, where in the face of approval of its system by only 12 percent of its workforce, the agency agreed with an NTEU demand to drop it for the 2007 rating period; and the Transportation Security Administration, where an unfair subjective pay system has led to dangerously high attrition rates.

She also mentioned the Department of Homeland Security, which has delayed imposing such a system on bargaining unit employees in large part because of its inability to devise a workable performance management system to go with it; and the Internal Revenue Service, in which a large segment of non-bargaining unit employees work under a pay-for-performance system that is the target of continuing sharp criticism from those covered by it.

The keys to such systems, Kelley said, rest on their fairness, their credibility and transparency with employees, as well as with the quality of managerial training in applying the system—and the willingness of agencies to hold managers accountable for the performance management and pay decisions they make under such a system.

The NTEU leader repeated her sharp criticisms of a late January report from the Office of Personnel Management claiming not only success for alternative pay systems, but characterizing them as the wave of the future in the federal workplace.

Kelley said at that time that NTEU’s extensive experience with such systems show they generate “a slew of grievances, arbitrations, litigation, high attrition rates and rock-bottom employee morale.” She added: “It is a mystery to me where the evidence is that these systems have produced successes to justify putting them in place throughout the federal government.”

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.