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Washington, D.C.—While a welcome development reflecting the continuing contributions of federal workers, the 2002 pay increase of 4.6 percent for the government’s civilian employees makes little meaningful progress in the critical step of closing the gap between public and private sector pay, the leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal workers said today.
President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said the 4.6 percent pay raise, which includes one percentage point allocated to locality pay to reflect regional cost differentials, “falls short of any serious impact” on the public-private pay gap. “If the federal government hopes to compete for the employees the public needs,” she said, “it simply must do better.”
The NTEU leader said she hopes the administration’s upcoming budget proposal “will take steps to close the pay gap,” which she called “the single greatest impediment to making the federal government the employer of choice” of high-quality job seekers.
“Everyone who has looked at the government’s human capital crisis, from the General Accounting Office (GAO), to congressional committees, to public interest groups and others,” Kelley said, “has identified low pay as the major contributing factor” in the government’s inability to attract and retain the caliber of employees the public wants and deserves.
“These recruitment and retention problems will only get worse in coming years,” the NTEU president said, noting that a variety of studies, by both government agencies and private groups, are projecting that as much as 53 percent of the present federal workforce will be eligible for early or regular retirement over the next four years.
As both the leader of the union representing some 150,000 employees in 25 agencies and departments and a member of the Federal Salary Council, Kelley urged again that the administration move toward full implementation of the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA).
That bipartisan legislation, signed into law in 1990 by President Bush’s father, called for closing the public-private pay gap in stages over 10 years. It has, however, not been implemented as intended, and today the pay gap is between 12 and 32 percent, depending on location.