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Letter: Pay-for-performance projects leaves no one better off

  • Jun 23, 2008
Regarding "Agencies to launch alternative-pay project": If Congress, the White House, and agencies want federal employees to accept a private sector pay-for-performance model such as this, they should start off by supporting and providing federal employees with private sector equivalent pay before instituting it.  So far Congress and executive branch have resisted instituting this pay parity!  So no one needs to wonder about one key reason why federal employees as a group don't support this pay-for-performance model. 

Another flaw in the model is that it still won't eliminate subjectivity instead of objectivity in ratings. As such, this model could result in someone potentially ending up with little or no salary increase despite having good performance.  At least under the current system an employee can get a cost-of-living increase!

The current system isn't broken, so leave it alone! It allows for outstanding performance awards, quality-step increases, on-the-spot awards and accelerated promotions.  All this piloting and testing of the pay for performance private sector model is a slick attempt to try to institute something stealthly that could not be forced on federal employees across the board! 

Remember that these efforts are from a crowd that suckered everyone into believing that federal employees would be better off without the Civil Service Retirement System.  We are now seeing that the notion was pure hogwash!

Anonymous

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Reader comments

Mon, Jul 14, 2008 pam johnson

NSPS is just a tool for the Pentagon to do away with the GS system and save money. Everyone knows half the raises won't count towards and retirement, and then the agencies will run out of money or employees will be at that point they can't get anymore raises. Who benefits, the Pentagon...We know the GS system works, problem is the govt wants to save money , first by not giving us pay parity with the private sector and now this. By the way, I make more than my boss, I am still GS.

Tue, Jun 24, 2008 Jay Logan

In theory the new NSPS system sounds good, but in practice it is a disaster. Even if uniform and unbiased evauation methods were actually used within each pay pool (which did not happen and cannot happen as all the supervisors have somewhat different perspective on evaluating people) the amount of added documentation is a big burden for all the people in the system. In some ways it seems to be set up to save money in the system by cutting pay in the long term to most people. In other ways, the cost to the system to generate the added documentation may actually add cost to the taxpayers. Leave it up to the Government to supposedly fix something and they only make things worst. NSPS is just another prime example.

Tue, Jun 24, 2008 P Daniel

The National Security Personnel Sytem is ripe with Good ol' Boy mentality, the very thing the GS personnel/pay system was instituted to prevent.As long as employees' ratings are their managers' hands, subjectivity & unfairness will prevail.

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