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Washington, D.C.—The leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal workers today expressed her “very great disappointment” at the refusal of the administration to create new locality pay areas for federal workers as a step in helping narrow the considerable public-private pay gap.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) took issue with the decision of a body known as the “President’s Pay Agent” that new locality pay areas were not needed for five locations under study as authorized by the Treasury and General Appropriations Act of 2001. The areas are Las Vegas, NV; Nashville, TN; Raleigh, NC; Austin, TX; and Louisville, KY.

“This very disappointing decision will keep federal employees in these areas at income levels below their private sector counterparts,” Kelley said, “and represents a lost opportunity by the administration to improve the government’s ability to attract and retain quality employees.”

The President’s Pay Agent, made up of the Secretary of Labor and the Directors of the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management, reported their decision to Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), chairman of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. They said they had concluded that “no currently available commercial salary data are accurate and complete enough to establish locality pay rates for these five areas.”

NTEU members in both Austin and Raleigh had been instrumental in securing language in the 2001 Treasury funding bill authorizing the study, working with Reps. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) and David Price (D-NC), both of whom said they would continue their efforts on behalf of federal employees in these areas.

Of the more than 5,400 federal employees in the Austin area, NTEU represents more than 3,500. Another 4,400 federal workers are employed in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina, including a large number in the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies represented by NTEU.

Under the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA), 31 separate

pay areas were established, in addition to an overall category known as “Rest of the United States,” or RUS. The Pay Agent’s decision means that federal workers in the five cities most recently studied will continue to receive the “RUS” locality adjustment.

Locality pay increases in the specified pay areas reflect incomes and costs in those regions and tend to be higher than that in the “RUS” category, which includes a much more widespread sampling of data.

The Pay Agent’s report said that even though its members “appreciate the high degree of professionalism of federal employees and believe they should be paid fairly,” adding new locality pay areas “must, at a minimum, await the introduction of planned improvements” in the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ salary survey methodology.

Kelley, who as a member of the Federal Salary Council has urged full implementation of FEPCA to close the public-private pay gap, was sharply critical of delays in improving BLS data and collection methods, emphasizing that “while the government decides how to collect and analyze the data, the pay of federal employees continues to undervalue them, and more and more employees are moving to the private sector.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 25 agencies and departments.