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Washington, D.C.—Any attempt by Congress to address concerns about personnel costs in the Customs Service by attacking night differential pay without looking at the expanding workload demands placed on Customs employees is “misguided and wrong,” the head of the union representing more than 12,000 Customs employees told a House subcommittee today.

In wide-ranging testimony about Customs and the work performed by its employees, President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said that proposed changes in night differential pay would result in a pay cut that would have “a devastating impact on the sense of value to the Customs mission of these hard-working men and women.”

This fiscal year, Kelley said, Customs estimates it will process over 500 million land, air and sea passengers, and handle more than 150 million carriers entering the nation’s ports helping generate more than $1.3 trillion in international trade. These responsibilities are in addition to the tasks associated with the agency’s drug fighting, money-laundering and anti-terrorism duties.

As it has in each of the past two Congresses, Kelley said NTEU will “vigorously oppose” any effort in the 107th Congress to reduce night premium pay provided in the 1993 Customs Officer Pay Reform Act [COPRA.] She noted that a General Accounting Office (GAO) study of such legislation revealed that 97 percent of Customs inspectors in five major ports around the country would have lost as much as $5,000 a year—with a nationwide loss in pay of nearly $5 million.

COPRA, Kelley said, is meant to compensate the agency’s inspectional personnel for living with the unpredictability and constant irregularity of their work schedules, which for many inspectors changes every two weeks, and reflect the need to protect the nation’s borders 24-hours-a-day. “The unpredictability of these schedules often wreaks havoc on family lives,” she said.

The NTEU president emphasized that the incentive pay system for Customs officers is similar to those in place for most other law enforcement jobs, in both the public and private sectors, where irregular hours and shifts are common. She added that NTEU believes that the enactment of COPRA, along with its subsequent implementation by the agency, “met the intent of Congress and has itself not caused a significant increase in night differential.”

The agency itself has attributed such increases to factors that include the rise in overall federal pay rates, the doubling of commercial workloads and the increases in staffing of locations and hours of service requested both by Congress and the trade community. She added that procedures recently installed by Customs provide overtime payments to inspectors for those hours that correspond to their overtime hours worked.

Kelley urged Customs funding beyond the $1.96 billion the administration has proposed for fiscal 2002. While this figure is $98 million more than the agency’s budget in fiscal 2001, it includes “the bare minimum or nothing for long term commitments” such as improvements to the agency’s ability to process trade quickly, as well as allowing for more aggressive law enforcement efforts. Along with many others, she said, NTEU believes Customs’ proposed funding for fiscal 2002 “is in jeopardy of falling short of its needs.”

She also strongly supported enactment of pending legislation that would provide law enforcement officer status for Customs inspectors and canine enforcement officers. That would place these employees on the same footing as other federal law enforcement officers.