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Washington, D.C. —Approval of legislation containing significant harmful changes to the workers compensation program for the federal workforce was sharply criticized today by President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).

“The Federal Employees Compensation Act (FECA) is a lifeline to federal employees hurt in the course of their service to the nation, and it is unconscionable to consider cutting its benefits,” said President Kelley.

She said NTEU will continue its fight against the language approved in a markup by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The provision in question would effectively and unfairly penalize workers who have lost their ability to earn a salary and retirement credits by cutting their benefit later in life. Additionally, the FECA family benefit, which provides a modestly-larger benefit for a recipient with dependents, would be eliminated.

These workforce-wide changes are contained in postal reform legislation marked up today by the committee and advanced by its chairman, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), and ranking member, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

During today’s debate, the committee rejected an NTEU-supported amendment offered by Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), which would have deleted from the bill the section dealing with FECA.

Last week, NTEU joined with a coalition of groups representing federal and postal employees and retirees in opposing these changes to FECA. Postal reform legislation, the coalition said in a letter to congressional leaders, is not the right place to impose government-wide insurance benefit cuts on disabled federal and postal employees.

President Kelley has long argued that the far better approach to addressing the costs of the program is to take all necessary steps to make sure the federal workplace is safe and that on-the-job injuries are rare.

At present, an employee injured on the job and unable to work receives payments equal to two-thirds of his or her wages at the time of their injury; this amount is slightly higher when the injured employee has dependents.

Under the measure adopted by the committee, the basic FECA payments would drop to 50 percent of pre-injury pay when a recipient reaches retirement age. “That is simply an unacceptable penalty for growing older,” the NTEU leader said.

Kelley often has pointed out that once an employee is receiving benefits under FECA, that employee receives no further retirement credit nor savings plan contribution matches—and is not able to make elective contributions to the federal Thrift Savings Plan.

NTEU is the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.