After reading Ron Sanders’ fictional account of the so-called “antiquated” civil service system and how blowing it up will solve the VA’s problems, I think it’s time for a reality check.
While female employees in the private sector earn 79 cents for every dollar earned by men, women and men doing the same job in the federal government earn virtually the same salary. That\u2019s because our federal pay system assigns salaries to the position, not the individual, the single most effective way to prevent any kind of pay discrimination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The personnel system also protects employees from arbitrary disciplinary actions, personal favoritism, or coercion related partisan political purposes. These protections are vitally important to ensure our public services are not held hostage to the whims of politically appointed executives and managers. Merit System rules do not protect bad employees from being removed or disciplined for just cause; they ensure all employees are treated fairly and without bias.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The system also carves out hiring preferences for veterans, individuals with disabilities, and other disenfranchised groups. These preferences help make the federal government a model employer that leads by example for other employers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the system is flexible enough to adapt to changing times and needs of a modern employer. In the 1990s, the pay system was overhauled to provide employees with salaries that vary by locality and larger salaries for high-demand occupations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the 2000s, Congress passed legislation that gave managers more flexibility in setting salaries and providing bonuses for recruiting, retaining, and relocating workers. Other changes have allowed employees to get their student loans repaid, use paid sick leave to care for a newborn or ill family member, and phase their retirement from government service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The list of new flexibilities is long, and in most cases, these new authorities have improved the General Schedule. In any case, the list stands as a refutation of the myth that the General Schedule is a relic, untouched by modernity, or that Congress has failed to address needed changes in the civil service system for decades on end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ve seen what can happen when outside consultants and partisan politicians attempt to blow up the system, as Ron Sanders advocates. We get colossal failures like the National Security Personnel System, which abandoned fairness and equality for a system that gave managers undue influence over how a quarter of a million Defense civilian workers were paid, evaluated, and rewarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In its brief three-year reign, NSPS damaged the federal government\u2019s excellent record of ensuring employees are paid and rewarded without regard to race, age, or gender. Using NSPS\u2019s managerial discretion, managers gave higher salaries, bigger raises, better performance ratings, and larger bonuses to white, male employees \u2013 especially those who worked closer to the Pentagon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
NSPS was an object lesson in what happens when the Booz Allen Hamilton plan advocated by Ron Sanders is implemented in a federal agency. Whatever its intentions, NSPS undermined basic Merit System principles of equal pay and treatment, as well as veterans\u2019 preferences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sanders points to the IRS reforms as a model of what can be achieved at the VA and elsewhere. Yet these so-called reforms were limited to some minor tweaks of the existing pay system, such as combining two pay grades into one and paying salaries above the Senior Executive Service pay scale for a limited number of jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, 90 percent of IRS employees remain under the GS pay system, according to the Office of Personnel Management\u2019s FedScope database. Hardly the “big bang” approach that Sanders is advocating for other agencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The truth is, the current civil service system has not only stood the test of time but adapted to changing times \u2013 all while retaining the basic principles of fairness and equality that are so vital for a public sector personnel system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s a model to emulate, not eviscerate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
J. David Cox Sr. is national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 670,000 federal and D.C. government employees nationwide.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AFGE President J. David Cox responds to Federal Times blog post on upending Veterans Affairs’ personnel system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":30800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":26,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1805],"class_list":["post-19271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinions"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"P7BWQG7JVFFWNCTGDJLH55OGOM","arc_canonical_url":"\/opinions\/2016\/08\/23\/no-the-va-personnel-system-doesnt-need-blowing-up\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n