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Washington, D.C.—While upholding a pay parity plan at the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) during the fiscal year just ended that shortchanged employees, a federal panel has cleared the way for renewed negotiations on pay between the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) and the agency.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said today the union intends to return to the bargaining table on SEC employees’ pay as soon as the agency’s 2003 appropriations bill is passed. NTEU won that right in a decision by the Federal Service Impasses Panel (FSIP), a decision she otherwise criticized as largely ignoring the intent of Congress regarding SEC pay parity.

The right to reopen bargaining, President Kelley said, “will be an opportunity for us to negotiate not just higher pay for employees, but to work to implement congressional intent that SEC employees be paid on a par with those of other federal financial regulatory agencies.”

This is particularly important, the NTEU leader said, because the SEC is facing the biggest caseload in its 70-year history—including “a massive cleanup after several spectacular bankruptcies.” As a result, she said, “it is vital that SEC employ the best and brightest to help reestablish worldwide confidence in our markets.”

Legislation signed earlier this year, after an extensive effort by NTEU, was designed to provide pay parity at the SEC as a way to stem the severe recruitment and retention problems long plaguing the agency.

But the administration failed to adequately fund pay parity in its budget proposal, and the agency in turn both allocated more of the available funds to raises for managers—and provided them with six percent larger raises than those for employees, thus ignoring the recruitment and retention problems.

In addition to the right to reopen pay negotiations—SEC had asked the FSIP to prevent that—NTEU also won the right to reopen negotiations over an awards program in a year if the union finds that the program is failing to increase the effectiveness of the commission.

Still, President Kelley was sharply critical of the FSIP decision, calling it “poorly reasoned” in that it glossed over or ignored critical financial data. She described it as one “that went against legitimate employee interests on virtually every issue.”

The NTEU leader noted that “the SEC plays the central role in policing the investment banking and accounting industries, while protecting investors and regulating markets.” She added that “Congress knew all of this when it passed pay parity legislation, yet the Panel ignored congressional intent and significantly undermined the agency’s ability to hire and retain the best and brightest.”

The FSIP has sole jurisdiction over all federal sector collective bargaining disputes. It issued its decision on the compensation bargaining impasse between NTEU and the SEC Friday evening. Earlier this year, President Bush replaced all seven members of the FSIP with political appointees, “none of whom are experienced arbitrators or otherwise recognized as collective bargaining experts,” Kelley said.

She added that while the agency may think the FSIP decision on bargaining over pay is the end of the dispute, “I think of it only as the beginning.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 27 agencies and departments.