A Balanced Pay System Serves Our Nation
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2012.02677.x |
| Author | Colleen M. Kelley |
| Date | 01 November 2012 |
| Published date | 01 November 2012 |
Perspective
Colleen M. Kelley is president
of the National Treasury Employees Union,
which represents 150,000 workers in 31
government agencies.
E-mail: nationalpresident@nteu.org
782 Public Administration Review • November | December 2012
Public Administration Review,
Vol. 72, Iss. 6, pp. 782–783. © 2012 by
The American Society for Public Administration.
DOI: 10.111/j.1540-6210.2012.02677.x.
Colleen M. Kelley
National Treasury Employees Union
A
s I watched NASA scientists erupt into cheers
at the successful landing of the Curiosity rover
on the surface of Mars this summer, several
questions came to my mind: How do you compensate
someone whose job is to reach for the stars or eradi-
cate a disease from this planet? What price do you put
on protecting our borders or halting an outbreak of a
food-borne illness?
is is the work that federal employees do every day,
whether they are in high-profi le positions or less her-
alded supporting roles, caring for veterans, preserving
our national parks, ensuring that our drinking water is
safe, or securing nuclear weapons. Survey after survey
shows that federal employees are passionate about the
work that they do and committed to the missions of
their agencies. e federal government provides them
the opportunity to perform meaningful and challeng-
ing work in service to our nation, but to attract and
retain high-caliber employees, the government must
also compensate them fairly.
As a longtime member of the Federal Salary Council,
I have spent years examining the issue of federal pay,
federal pay studies, and fair compensation systems.
Given the great diversity in the jobs performed by
employees and the fact that taxpayer dollars are at
stake, the system for setting appropriate compensation
must be fair, credible, and transparent, and it must
attract and keep highly skilled workers. at is why
the current federal pay system aims to fi nd a balance
between off ering competitive wages and benefi ts, a
secure retirement, and a satisfying work environment.
Still, some critics claim that federal employees are
overpaid and off er very carefully selected data, artfully
presented, to make a seemingly convincing case. In
the end, however, those methodologies are fl awed, and
using them could lead to bad policy decisions.
e U.S. Government Accountability Offi ce (GAO)
identifi ed three methods that have been used to study
how the pay of federal employees stacks up against
the pay of those in the private sector: human capital
analysis, pay trends analysis, and job-to-job analysis
(GAO 2012). ose who want to reach a predeter-
mined conclusion that federal employees are overpaid
tend to rely on the fi rst two methods.
e human capital approach, which is used by the
American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage
Foundation, falls short of being an acceptable method
for informing pay policy because it draws into the
analysis demographic and personal attributes—such
as gender, years of education, and race—that are
unrelated to the actual work performed. e GAO
reports that most compensation experts agree that this
method is unsuitable for setting pay, and I believe its
conclusions are misleading when applied to the federal
government. Likewise, the pay trends analysis is broad
in nature, looking at pay over time without taking
into account how the actual work of federal employees
is similar to or diff ers from that in the private sector.
Other studies have focused on comparing benefi ts
as well as wages, an approach that is signifi cantly
hindered by the lack of available data. Early this year,
the Congressional Budget Offi ce (CBO) released one
such study admitting that its benefi ts comparisons are
“more uncertain than its estimates of wages.”
at uncertainty did not stop the CBO from con-
cluding that the highest-paid federal employees are
underpaid when compared to the private sector, while
the lowest-paid federal workers are overpaid.
e logical policy implications of the CBO study and
other such reports would be to provide signifi cant
raises to the highest-paid federal employees of up
to $50,000 annually, while drastically slashing basic
benefi ts for the lowest-paid federal workers.
Clearly, that would be wrong: the federal govern-
ment must set a standard of basic fairness. Contrary
to media portrayals of “generous” federal benefi ts,
federal employees do not receive paid dental or vision
A Balanced Pay System Serves Our Nation
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