responsibility shared by the U. S. Civil Service Commission and the Office of Management and Budget. This dual responsibility should be limited to establishment of national pay structures as indicated in an earlier section of this Report and the U. S. Civil Service Commission should be the recognized agent of the President for the development and implementation of job evaluation and other pay systems. A general statement of the responsibilities and accountabilities for the various organizations concerned has been outlined above. The two most recent pieces of legislation--the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 and the Federal Pay Comparability Act of 1970--provided for greater Executive Branch authority. The proposed legislation should be in keeping with that trend as well as the findings and recommendations of the House Subcommittee on Position Classification, as stated in this Report. Introduction Public Law 91-216 noted that "the large number and variety of job evaluation and ranking systems in the Executive Branch have resulted in significant inequities in selection, promotion, and pay of employees in comparable positions among these systems;" /sec. 101(2)_7. Many of the inequities will be eliminated as a direct consequence of the consolidation and coordination of job evaluation and ranking systems as proposed by the Task Force. the number of separate job evaluation and ranking systems, the fewer the opportunities for such inequities to exist. The fewer There remain, however, certain circumstances which will continue to produce serious inequities. In some cases new legislation will be needed; in other instances new administrative procedures within the framework of existing law will suffice. Though these matters are, strictly speaking, outside the scope of the Task Force project, it has been impossible, during the course of the work, to avoid giving these matters some thought. Premium Pay Separate procedures, regulations and, ultimately, laws govern premium pay treatment for various groups of Federal employees, a problem which will not be resolved by the Task Force proposals. At the present time, for example, premium pay for General Schedule employees differs from that for prevailing rate employees under the Coordinated Federal Wage System. Under the Task Force proposals, clerical, office machine operation, and technician employees would become community prevailing salary employees, but would not be under the same administrative procedures as trade, craft, and labor employees. Hence, two sets of premium pay procedures may become three. A junior engineer under APTES, a technician under COMOT, and a craftsman under CFWS all working side by side at similar if not identical rates of basic pay may receive rather different premiums for exposure to the same hazard. Special premium pay legislation exists covering certain groups of employees engaged in inspectional activities. For operation of the coordinated plan being proposed by the Task Force to be fully responsive to the intent of Congress, these differences and inequities should be critically reexamined and eliminated wherever possible. Occupational Coding The Task Force recommends that for job evaluation and pay purposes Federal civilian employees be treated like private sector employees. Thus, for example, it is proposed that the categorization of Federal employees be along the lines of the nonexempt/exempt dichotomy of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The use of a standardized nomenclature would be of assistance in implementing this recommendation. It is urged that the Federal Government consider adoption of an occupational coding scheme such as the Dictionary of Occupational Titles prepared by the U. S. Department of Labor, with the following advantages: - Clear identification of lines of interoccupational movement, between Federal and Easier access to manpower sources identified by Department of Labor manpower programs. - Easier job matches in wage and salary surveys. Two of the more visible aspects of the Task Force proposals are the replacement of the General Schedule by a series of separate job evaluation and ranking systems and, within each of the proposed new systems, a realignment of traditional job relationships. The purpose of these changes is to adapt a single overall job evaluation method to recognizably different groups of jobs, and to reflect more accurately external labor market relationships. Effective operation of the coordinated plan will require, therefore, a revision of qualifications standards. - Eligibility for lateral interoccupational movement will require clear redefinition in terms of the new internal job alignments. Career ladders, both within and between systems, will have to be clearly indicated in terms of qualifications required. Mobility--horizontal and vertical-- should be encouraged and facilitated by the existence of realistic qualifications standards. This will be of particular importance where job evaluation systems abut or overlap. Performance Evaluation Under present policy, performance evaluation is considered an integral part of an agency's personnel management program, used to improve employees' work through a fair appraisal of their performance on the job. Proper use of such evaluations helps improve employee performance by: -- identifying work standards and requirements and informing employees of their performance against these standards; - recognizing outstanding performance as well as work deficiencies. While these are all worthwhile purposes, the present performance rating system lacks a strong built-in incentive to improved performance. Cash awards for outstanding performance are occasionally granted, as are quality step increases. However, because within-grade increases are granted as a matter of course, and since employees are limited by law to the number of equivalent increases which they may receive during a given period, the granting of quality step increases is severely limited. In the process, the performance rating system itself has suffered. Therefore, the Task Force proposal that within-grade salary advancement beyond some fixed point in the salary range for each skill level be on the sole basis of merit will restore incentive to the performance evaluation system and at the same time require serious redesign of the performance evaluation system itself. |