Letter To Sturgell, A Look At Pay To Come

A 10-year, performance-based pay system used by the Federal Aviation Administration is still criticized by employees, and may soon be challenged in court.

Tim O'Hara, a 24-year FAA employee, recently sent a letter to acting administrator Robert A. Sturgell complaining about the system. He copied the note to 1,000 other employees with the administration.

O'Hara wrote the pay system is "both a myriad and a significant depressant on the morale of the FAA workforce. Significant corrections need to be made."

The message came just as the FAA will announce its 2008 pay increase for its employees.
The Sturgell letter was well-timed for future action.

A group of FAA employees is financing a class-action lawsuit aimed at forcing changes in pay policies, with O'Hara as the designated plaintiff, according to The Washington Post.

The campaign at the FAA points out the challenges agencies face when they change pay rules ... and attempt to justify those changes to employees.

Bush administration officials contend linking pay raises to a higher standard of appraisals will help improve the agencies' performance. Other newer employees fear they will fall behind the General Schedule, which provides annual raises.

FAA pay policies are explosive. Raises and pay are catalysts that have motivated air traffic controllers into unions for years.

The agency is now drawing fire from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and gets regular criticism from the FAA's largest union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

Because of union contracts, pay varies from employee to employee over a performance-based pay program, the Core Compensation System. The purpose of the core system is to attract and keep new employees in the system. The problem is that the core system does not increase pay to those that have hit the pay ceiling. Over 9,500 fall under this category, O'Hara estimated.

The core system's lump sum does not count toward retirement... a sour point for many of the employees, including O'Hara who calculated that he has lost more than $6,500 a year in pension income because of the core system.

In his letter, O'Hara told Sturgell the agency's pay-setting process needs to be less secretive. The FAA uses market surveys to help set salaries but doesn't share its methodology for comparing agency jobs to the private sector, O'Hara said.

The FAA will not comment because of the impending class-action suit on O'Hara's contention that lump-sum payments and bonuses effectively reduce pensions.

By many indications, from both without and within, the FAA is a tough place to work. The agency ranked 204th out of 222 agencies in a "best places to work" index compiled this year by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service and American University's Institute for Public Policy Implementation.

O'Hara criticized the FAA for not revealing the results of an independent team's results that evaluated the Core Compensation System.

"I believe there exists fundamental flaws in the process," he said. "If they want to have some integrity with the workforce, then weaknesses have to be identified, corrections have to be made. And this needs to be done."

FMI: www.faa.gov, www.natca.org