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Washington, D.C.—By a wide margin, members of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) have ratified a new, four-year compensation agreement that boosts their pay and retains important existing benefits in the face of agency efforts to reduce them.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said the new agreement, which calls for overall pay increases averaging 4.2 percent each year through 2009, with a possible extension into 2010, provides FDIC employees with a compensation package “that is among the best, if not the best, in the federal government.”

The FDIC is a major federal financial regulatory agency funded by fees paid by the institutions it regulates, rather than by a congressional appropriation. NTEU, which represents nearly 3,300 FDIC employees, has the right to bargain with FDIC over pay.

Along with increasing their pay, Kelley said NTEU’s efforts at the bargaining table have “made a significant difference” in other ways for FDIC employees, including preservation of the five percent employer matching contributions to the FDIC Savings Plan and retention of the corporation’s present 83 percent contribution to employee health care costs. FDIC sought to reduce that payment to the government-wide average of 72 percent—a move that would have doubled employee health care premiums.

Under the new compensation agreement, individual pay increases will be tied to assessments of each employee’s overall performance, including analyses using criteria for both the employee’s job-based performance and his or her contributions to corporate goals.

“We have made some fundamental changes” to the pay increase determination process, President Kelley said, “to require that all employees are systematically evaluated; that evaluations include scores based on job-specific performance criteria; and that placement in a pay group is based on an assessment of an employee’s total performance in comparison to similar employees.”

She said NTEU is “confident that the changes we have made will result in pay determinations that are more fair, transparent and credible.”

On the matter of locality pay, which has helped keep the pay of FDIC employees competitive both with other federal financial regulatory agencies and the private sector, the parties agreed to return to the bargaining table later this year “to try to develop a better system going forward.”

As part of their agreement, FDIC and NTEU agreed to freeze FDIC locality pay for most areas at 2005 levels.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments.