Proof of this lies in comparing the provisions of these Bills with the provisions of Chapter 532-1 of the Federal Personnel Manual of January 10, 1968, which governs Wage Board employees. Basically a good many of the same kinds of techniques, procedures and modalities of inter-agency cooperation envisaged in these Bills already exist in current regulations.

Where then do the main differences exist? And what are they?

Besides the fact that these Bills give a statutory basis for fixing and adjusting the rates of compensation of wage board employees, the main specific differences concern the following:

1. the composition and role of the National Wage Policy Committee; 2. the inclusion of employees of non-appropriated funds in the wage board system;

3. a statutory provision for the cooperation of private enterprises having government contracts in the conduct of the local wage surveys;

4. the introduction of a ten-step Wage Rate Schedule;

5. the provision of equitable overtime, shift differential and travel time

pay.

NATIONAL WAGE FOLICY COMMITTEE

As regards the composition and role of the National Wage Policy Committee, which would be empowered with the general supervision over the Wage Board Compensation System, these Bills provide for a "standing committee", to be known as the National Wage Policy Committee to be composed of eleven members. In sharp contrast with the present system, however, these Bills state that the Chairman of the Wage Policy Committee "shall be appointed by the President of the United States and shall serve at the pleasure of the President". Further, the Chairman shall come "from outside the Federal Service" and he "shall not hold any other office in the Federal Service".

This is a major break with the present system and a great improvement upon it. It introduces the concept and the role of the Chairman of the Committee who is not wedded either to the Federal management side or to the union side. Perhaps the best way to state his role is that he should represent, on behalf of the President, the comprehensive interests of the people of the United States in dealing with Wage Board matters rather than the specific interests of any one agency or organization.

The five management representatives, under these Bills, would be appointed almost identically as now, excepting, of course, that the representative of the Civil Service Commission would be regarded as acting as a management member instead of retaining his present ambiguous role of being supposedly the neutral Chairman of the Committee. This is a much more appropriate role for the representative of the Civil Service Commission and removes him from the many conflicts of interest with which he is now confronted.

As for the five labor union representatives on the Committee, I should like to propose a substitute formula for the one appearing in these Bills. The substitution I am offering has the advantage of allowing for changes in the future consistent with any changes in union representation. In place of the language appearing as "subparagraph (2)" on page 10 of S. 2371 beginning on line 7 and ending on line 18, I should like to offer the following substitute language:

"(2) five representatives from the several Federal employee unions, representing under exclusive recognition of the Federal government the largest number of prevailing rate employees throughout the Federal service. These representatives shall be appointed on the basis of their appropriate proportional share in the total representation under exclusive recognition of Federal and District of Columbia prevailing rate employees. However, in any case there shall not be more than two representatives from any one employee union nor more than four representatives from a single council, federation, alliance, association, or affiliation of employee unions;"

NONAPPROPRIATED FUNDS

The second major change these bills would make in the present system would be the application of the wage board concept to employees of Federal instrumentalities paying their workers from non-appropriated funds.

If the wage board employees of the Federal government have been its "forgotten men," then certainly the non-appropriated fund employees, numbering more than 75,000 human beings, have been its "forgotten and deprived men and women." If any group of employees, whether working for the Federal government or for private enterprise, has suffered injustice or inequity, these employees have been

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subjected to the rankest kind of injustice. They are today in dire need of relief from the lack of a suitable method of fixing their pay in an equitable manner. The vast majority of these employees in fact work in the Department of Defense and in the Veterans' Administration. Many of them are wives or children of servicemen serving abroad on the battlefield or their widows who must work to make ends meet. Their wages are sub-standard by any criterion which is applied to other employees in Federal installations.

Until 1966, their wages were so low and the non-appropriated-fund managers so indifferent to their pleas for equity that our organization, the AFGE, finally had no other recourse but to request the Congress to include these employees explicitly in PL 89-601, "The Fair Labor Standards Amendment of 1966." Their inclusion under the Federal minimum wage standards appears as Section 306 of that law.

I wish to emphasize it required their inclusion in those amendments merely to bring them up to the minimum wages paid in private enterprise. The actual wages they receive are still much, much below the going wage paid for the same work being paid in private enterprise or to wage board employees.

For whom do non-appropriated fund employees work? The Wall Street Journal, of June 10, 1968, correctly described one of the larger employers and I quote the following from it:

"Joseph Schuyler Hardin runs a retail operation like no other. It's publicly owned, but doesn't have a single share of stock in public hands. It earned more last year then J. C. Penney Co. and Montgomery Ward and Co. combined, yet it never pays taxes or dividends. And it doesn't worry much about what competitors are doing.

Army Brig. Gen. Hardin's enterprise is called the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES). It operates the PX (Post Exchange) on Army installations and the BX (Base Exchange) on Air Force Bases.

* * * Unlike the nonprofit military commissaries, which sell only groceries and are funded by Congressional appropriations, the AAFES seeks to make as big a profit as it can and its results are more than respectable.

In the fiscal year ended last January 25, the service had a net income of $112 million on sales of $2.1 billion, up from earnings of $66.3 million five years earlier, when sales were $941 million. For comparative purposes, during its most recent year Penney earned $89.5 million on sales of $2.7 billion, and Montgomery Ward had net income of $17.4 million on a volume of $1.8 billion.

*** Much of the profit goes into funds supporting recreational activities of servicemen. Since 1957, some 656.4 million dollars produced by the PXs and BXs has been pumped into the building of golf courses, bowling alleys, libraries, swimming pools and other recreational activities for troops. A small part of the profit is used to expand and modernize outlets".

What this article omits, of course, is that a good part of the hugh profits pumped into golf courses, bowling alleys and other recreational activities comes directly from the sweat and the poverty of employees of the AAFES who are not paid a decent wage. We in the AFGE believe in providing recreation to everyone-but not at the cost of the health, the hunger and the literal poverty of thousands of employees.

I can think of no single provision more needed by human beings working in Federal installations than this provision in these Bills to pay employees of nonappropriated funds at rates of pay comparable to those of wage board employees. Sheer human decency and justice requires this. We will not have ended wage slavery until such a provision is the law of the land.

CONDUCT OF LOCAL SURVEYS

The third main difference from the present system in these Bills relates to the provision for the cooperation of private enterprises having government contracts in the conduct of the local wage surveys. This provision appears in the Bills under paragraph 5347, section e, in lines 18 through 20 on page 18. Perhaps the language of this section should be altered a little to make clear that it is intended to cover those enterprises engaged in interstate commerce. But in any case, it should be obvious to everyone that unless private enterprises supply the data on an impartial basis to the wage survey teams they cannot carry on their work.

Unfortunately, some employers and managers of private enterprises have refused to cooperate in the past allegedly because they were under the false impression that the members of the Federal survey teams, nominated by unions, represent the interests of their unions and might even misuse the data collected to organize or unionize private enterprises which are still "non-union".

This misunderstanding should be cleared up at once. All the members of the local wage survey committee are Federal employees and represent the Federal government in precisely the same way as the members selected by management. In fact, experience shows that in some instances management itself would have been more willing to pick the representative already nominated by the union. This is because the man picked by the union was the best informed and most trusted person in the installation.

THE MONRONEY AMENDMENT

I should like at this point to speak directly to the issue of the "outside survey area" which has to be chosen in cases where the actual geographic survey area does not contain any comparable private enterprises.

As the Subcommittee will recall, the question of applying the rates found in "outside survey areas" to wage board employees was the subject of legislation in the Monroney Amendment to Public Law 90-560 of October 12, 1968. The intent of the amendment was to apply the rates found in the "outside survey area" through collation, or "ploughing," into the pay line set for all wage board employees in the original survey area. Although this was the obvious intent, there developed a considerable amount of administrative delay and misinterpretation as to the precise meaning of the Monroney Amendment.

Fortunately, through discussions within the Federal government between management and labor, this issue has now been clarified. The proper interpretations, therefore, are now being placed upon the Monroney Amendment and, it is now evident, that no new legislative language is necessary.

For this reason, I recommend that your Subcommittee substitute the text of the original Monroney Amendment for the language now appearing under Section 5342(a)(12) on page 7, line 5 to 13 inclusive in these Bills. The language we, therefore, prefer would be as follows:

"(12) 'outside survey area' means a wage survey area outside of a specified wage area selected by the Policy Committee. A lead agency, in making a wage survey, shall determine whether there exists in the local wage area a sufficient number of comparable positions in private enterprise to establish wage schedules for principal types of positions for which the survey is made, and that the determination shall be in writing and shall take into consideration all relevant evidence including evidence submitted by employee organizations recognized as representative of employees in the area; and that when it is determined that there is an insufficient number of comparable positions in private industry to establish the wage schedules, the lead agency shall establish the wage schedules on the basis of local private industry rates and rates paid for comparable positions in private industry in the nearest wage area that it determines to be most similar in the nature of its population, employment, manpower, and industry to the wage area for which the survey is being made;"

TEN STEPS WITHIN EACH GRADE

The fourth kind of provisions included in these Bills differing from the present system concerns the Wage Rate Schedule. In section 5346, the Bills provide for a ten-step wage schedule similar to the within-grade steps now already available to employees working under the Classification Act. It provides further that each successive rate shall not be less than 3 per cent more than the preceding rate.

One would think that this innovation would be considered a matter of common sense, since there is no sound reason for not introducing such a wage rate progression into the wage board system. In fact, the successful use of the same system for classified employees serves as the best argument for using it for wage board employees. Yet, I have heard arguments in the past against the application of the ten-step system. Some say it shouldn't apply because private enterprise doesn't use it. I doubt that this allegation would stand up to careful scrutiny because I know of some situations where it is used, if not as a 10-step system, then as an eight or seven step. But the principle used is the same in any case.

I should like to recall here that in the summer of 1941 during the Hearings which lead to the enactment of PL 200 of the 77th Congress establishing the 10step within-grade system for classified employees, not a single one of the witnesses from the Civil Service Commission or the Bureau of the Budget opposed such a system. In fact, the Hearings record shows that Ismar Baruch, the Chief of the Personnel Classification Division of the Civil Service Commission, officially endorsed such action, stating as follows:

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"In the first place, of course, quite generally, we are interested in any legislation which improves the orderliness of personnel administration or salary administration and which would tend to increase the effectiveness or morale of government employees. . . . The Commission favors this Bill because it believes it to be a necessary supplement or complement to the Classification Act of 1923 . . .' In the same way, using the same words, I request that your Subcommittee incorporate the ten-step system into legislation for the wage board employees. This would be an action "which improves the orderliness of personnel administration or salary administration and which would tend to increase the effectiveness or morale of government employees".

I know also that today the overwhelming majority, more than 90 per cent of all wage board employees in fact, are in the third and last step of each grade. Most of them got there after one and a half years of satisfactory service. Are they then supposed to stay there all the rest of their lives, never moving higher? This is not a rational approach to developing incentive; this is not good personnel administration of a career system.

As I stated earlier, the situation is even worse than that. When we compare the pay range in the classified service grades with that of the wage board, we find that, in the ten-step system of the classified employees, the range of pay between the bottom and the top is thirty per cent; and in the twelve-step system of the postal field service, it is 36% per cent. But the range of pay in the three-step system of the wage board between the bottom and the top is only 8 per cent. I say that this is rank discrimination.

But we are not through with odious comparisons. I should like to add one more. Today the wage board supervisory grades have five steps and not three. Moreover, the range of pay between the lowest and the highest of these averages to 15 per cent. Here then we find that the present state of affairs discriminates not only between the classified and postal workers, on the one hand, and the wage board employees on the other; it even discriminates within the wage board system itself in favor of the supervisors and against the non-supervisory employees. I think this is the most abysmal kind of discrimination; it is shameful and intolerable and should be ended

at once.

OVERTIME, SHIFT DIFFERENTIAL AND TRAVEL

For a good wage board system, one should also have appropriate differential for duty which involves a recognizable degree of physical hardship or of hazard in its performance.

These Bills provide that the National Wage Policy Committee shall make recommendations for such a schedule of differentials. This provision is necessary because the Federal government largely ignores this consideration today. The Navy Department under its own regulations could pay up to 100 per cent differential. It pays a piddling twenty cents an hour, even for the most dangerous kind of work. The Army could pay up to 50 per cent. It pays 30 per cent of the Navy differential, that is, a "flat" six cents. It is incredible that these rates of differentials are paid when employees of private contractors working alongside the Federal employees actually get up to a 100 per cent differential.

I think I should also call attention to the fact that the Congress has itself authorized the payment of a 25 per cent differential for classified employees intermittently engaged in hazardous occupations. Yet, ironically, no differential at all has been authorized for wage board employees engaged in regular and recurring hazardous duties.

Similarly, the Bills stipulate that the night shift differential now paid to classified employees, amounting to 10 per cent, will be paid also to wage board employees. Another important provision of this Bill relates to travel time. Today, management takes advantage of wage board employees by requiring them to travel to distant places of work on their own time. Most often this situation arises because the supervisor has scheduled the work of his activity improperly or dispatched and assigned his employees to work sites inefficiently. This is an abuse of the right of the wage board employees to their own life and it is an invasion of their privacy through the invasion of their private time.

To correct this situation, the Bill requires that "whenever practical travel will be scheduled during regular duty hours". It then stipulates that when "impractical, and travel is scheduled outside normal duty hours, all hours involving travel, including necessary layover time, shall be construed as duty time and compensated accordingly".

I am sure that as soon as these Bills are enacted and supervisors will be required to justify paying for their poor scheduling of travel time, the abuses will end. Then travel will be authorized only when and if it is actually required in the public interest and not solely because the supervisor had not worked out his plans properly.

CONCLUSION

Mr. Chairman, and distinguished members of the Subcommittee, there are many other worthy items in these Bills on which I have not had time to comment. However, I believe that the principles and the concepts which I have invoked apply equally to them. Basically, what I have been saying is that the wage board employee and the non-appropriated fund employee should be treated equally with the classified service employee and the postal field service employee. We should deal fairly and justly with them. We should not discriminate against them.

I know that these Bills will end this discrimination. Once it is passed, the "forgotten men" and the "forgotten and deprived men and women" of the Feteral service will know that discrimination has ended at last.

I appreciate most sincerely the privilege you have extended to me, Mr. Chairman, in allowing me to appear before you today. I thank all of the Subcommittee members for their patience and generosity in listening to me for this length of time. And finally, I ask you once again to enact wage board legislation this year. Mr. GRINER. Now I would like to ask for an exception.

SPECIAL CASE OF ALASKA

I have just come back from an extensive survey trip to Alaska during which I tried to isolate the special problems which affect all employees there, private enterprise as well as Federal, State, and local government.

One fact is clear. There are so few large private enterprises employing 300 or more workers that the provision in S. 231 and associated bills limiting wage surveys to private establishments with 300 or more employees cannot be effectively carried out in Alaska.

I therefore recommend that the State of Alaska be specifically exempted from the provisions of subparagraph (c) (4) of section 5343 of S. 231 and other associated bills appearing on lines 16 through 18 of page 6 of the printed text of S. 231.

The CHAIRMAN. Does the Senator from Alaska agree with the proposal?

Senator STEVENS. I certainly do. I think it shows what might result from a trip if we could take the whole committee up there this year. John has traveled throughout the State. He spent a great deal of time with our people, and I think he has come back with several good recommendations.

Mr. GRINER. To my personal knowledge, the Senator from Alaska has a number of other problems up there, which I am sure this committee would be interested in.

The CHAIRMAN. Are their problems related to this legislation?
Mr. GRINER. They are related to the committee, let's say.

Senator FONG. Are you trying to get him reelected, John? [Laughter.]

Mr. GRINER. I don't know of a better man.

Senator RANDOLPH. Mr. Chairman, if we are having general comment, I said earlier good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and I was trying to move the hearing along at that time.

I did not address myself particularly other than a general good morning. But I would now like to do so with an even more pleasant good morning to the West Virginians who are here.