An advisory council on federal pay-setting that was dormant all of 2017 has set a meeting for April 10 at which it will catch up on its work and deal with pay-related issues for 2019 and potentially beyond.
The Federal Salary Council, consisting of federal employee unions and outside experts on compensation matters, oversees the GS locality pay system. It typically meets each autumn but no meeting was held last year as its leadership remained unfilled. Late in the year Ron Sanders, who held numerous personnel-related positions inside and outside the government, was named chairman.
The council annually calculates the “pay gaps” by locality, based on data from the Labor Department showing that federal employees are underpaid on average by about one-third. However, those figures have never been used to close those gaps as the underlying law envisioned, due to the cost and disputes over methodology.
Using different data and different ways of comparing, the CBO reported last year that salaries on average are about equal, although with the least educated federal employees at a substantial advantage and the most educated at a substantial disadvantage. Studies by conservative think tanks have said that federal employees on average are substantially overpaid.
The council also makes recommendations on the number and boundaries of GS localities, which are then passed to a higher level body called the President’s Pay Agent. The council for several years has advocated creating new localities in the Norfolk, Va., Burlington, Vt., San Antonio, Texas, and Birmingham, Ala., areas. That would produce a pay boost for employees working in those areas by taking them out of the lowest-paid locality, the catchall “rest of the U.S.” and giving them location-specific pay rates.
The council also has recommended changing policies on the drawing of boundary lines in a way that would bring more areas on the outside edges of existing localities into those localities, with the same effect for employees working in those outlying areas.
Both creating new localities and expanding existing borders would require going through a formal rule-making process, however, and the Pay Agent has been more open to the former than to the latter.
