New ‘Pay Gap’ Number Coming

The Federal Salary Council has scheduled for October 17 its annual meeting at which the official “pay gap” figure is announced, based on Labor Department data presented there. The current figure is 35.4 percent, a number that could well rise since the 2014 federal pay raise of 1 percent fell below an indicator for average private sector increases. The pay gap number is used by employee unions and some in Congress to argue in favor of a larger federal pay raise; a 1 percent increase in January 2015 is almost certain and there is little chance that number will be increased, however. The number also commonly sets off a debate over how federal and private sector salaries compare, since different methods and different sets of data produce widely varying results. The Salary Council is a group of union officials and pay experts who make recommendations regarding the GS locality pay system to a higher-level body of agency officials called the President’s Pay Agent, who in turn report to the President. For the last several years the salary council has recommended creating 12 more localities where employees would receive slightly higher pay than they currently receive as part of the catchall “rest of the U.S.” locality, and revising policies on how locality boundary lines are drawn to include more outlying areas—again, to the benefit of employees working there. However, the pay agent has not put those recommendations in effect, saying more work is needed. That group also has rejected the salary council’s calls for restoring certain statistics previously used in the pay comparison, saying the Labor Department does not have the funding to collect and analyze that data.