Several annual announcements regarding federal pay have been delayed, at a time when both Congress and the White House seem content to allow a 1 percent raise in January take effect by default by not acting by the end of the year on the issue. A meeting of the Federal Salary Council originally scheduled for November 5 was been delayed until December 17. That meeting is where the annual "pay gap" figure is announced, a number that is supposed to be used to set the locality component of annual raises. Meanwhile, the Labor Department delayed the annual announcement of a measure of private sector wage growth that is supposed to be used as the basis for the White House’s upcoming budgetary proposal on the across the board component of the raise—affecting the following year, 2015 in this case. Both of those mechanisms were created by a 1990 federal pay law and while the figures they generate have not been put into effect as the law envisioned, they are the government’s formal mechanisms on pay and employee organizations use the figures in arguing in favor of raises.
