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Washington, D.C. —The nation’s largest independent union of federal employees is strongly opposed to budget and debt ceiling negotiation proposals that would severely impact federal pensions and be a major step backward in federal agency recruiting efforts, its leader said.

In a letter to every member of the House and Senate calling for “shared sacrifice,” President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said: “Federal employees did not cause this crisis, and the crisis will not be solved by cuts to federal employees.”

NTEU is fighting back against the attack on federal workers with rallies, grassroots action, and a public awareness campaign to be launched tomorrow. The union held a high-profile rally in New York yesterday attended by more than 500 federal employees, which followed earlier rallies in Washington, DC and Detroit.

In her letter to lawmakers, the NTEU president wrote, “A plan that does not include closing tax loopholes for oil companies or corporate jets, or other groups in the top one percent of income in this country, is simply not fair. It makes no sense to impose great hardship on the hard-working middle class men and women of the civil service while the wealthiest Americans sacrifice nothing at all. This is not shared sacrifice.”

Kelley’s letter came amid reports of proposals for increases in employee contributions to both the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) and the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS), along with a large boost in the contribution to FERS by newly-hired federal workers and a proposal to change the annuity formula from the present use of an employee’s high-three average salary to a high-five calculation. This would effectively lower a retiree’s annuity.

The proposals would amount to pay reductions of as much as five to six percent for federal workers and negatively impact recruitment and retention efforts of federal agencies.

President Kelley noted that federal employees were the first group to be targeted by deficit reduction moves and are currently laboring under a two-year pay freeze. “We should get the millionaires and billionaires in the game before hitting federal workers a second time,” she said.

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