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Washington, D.C.—There is no meaningful evidence that any proposed alternative personnel system, including a pay system that has no credibility with employees, has any positive impact on recruiting or retaining federal workers—or on maximizing their performance, the head of the nation’s largest independent union of federal workers told a Senate subcommittee today.

Instead, said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), the single most important factor in accomplishing those ends is leadership at every level of the government “that solicits, values and acts on the ideas of front-line employees.”

And that sort of leadership is missing in many agencies today, President Kelley told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia.

“I believe that providing that kind of leadership would do more to improve the quality of applicants and performance of employees than any of the alternative personnel systems” under discussion by the administration, she added.

NTEU has considerable experience with alternative personnel systems, including compensation bargaining, in the federal sector. NTEU bargains over compensation at a number of agencies funded through user fees—including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), where it has bargained over pay since 1997.

Despite agreement between NTEU and the FDIC on some aspects of a pay for performance system, including the need for adequate funding, the union has “serious concerns about the current state of the pay system at the FDIC,” Kelley said. The system, known as the Corporate Success Award, limits pay increases to only one-third of eligible employees.

“The arbitrary limitation on the availability of pay adjustments to just one-third of the work force has demoralized and angered FDIC employees,” Kelley said, “Our members report that the system is divisive…and sends the message that two-thirds of the work force is not contributing.” NTEU and the FDIC are currently in negotiations over changes to the pay system.

NTEU is also leading the fight against sweeping personnel changes in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that would effectively strip a wide variety of important rights from employees.

In the absence of a statutorily-defined pay system such as the General Schedule for federal workers, she said, “pay should be subject to collective bargaining, as it is in the private sector.” That is especially important in a government environment, she said, where both employees and the public “need a credible means of ensuring that pay is set objectively.”

The NTEU leader also took aim at the paybanding system currently covering managers at the Internal Revenue System. She pointed to an independent evaluation of the system which reported, among other less-than-glowing conclusions, that 76 percent of covered employees felt the system had a negative or no impact on their motivation to perform.

“It is a mystery to me,” Kelley concluded, “where the evidence is that these systems have produced successes to justify putting them in place throughout the federal government.”

As the nation’s largest independent federal union, NTEU represents some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments.