Federal labor unions say NSPS is toxic

Sometime after Labor Day, the Defense Business Board hands over its final report to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Office of Personnel Management director John Berry on the subject of the National Security Personnel System - NSPS.

A little less than two months ago, union members picketed against NSPS as a special DBB task force held its final public hearings on the matter at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia. The protests underscored long-festering opposition to the pay for performance plan imposed on some Pentagon workers by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Federal News Radio decided to do a "reality check" with two of the labor unions representing DOD workers, to see whether any attitudes have changed.

Bill Dougan is president of the National Federation of Federal Employees. His organization has been lobbying against NSPS since it was first imposed by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and he finds no reason to change now, even as the DBB calls for tweaking the pay for performance plan.

"The NSPS is toxic, and repackaging it makes no sense," he said in a telephone interview. "We believe it's a failed product, a failed system that has provided no utility to the federal workforce, or to making our employees more productive, or anything else."

Another labor union trying to upend NSPS is the American Federation of Government Employees. Federal News Radio spoke to AFGE's president, John Gage, who is in Reno, Nevada preparing for his union's annual conference which begins next week.

I've had an opportunity to review the final report, and it's pretty weak. It makes a very strong diagnosis on NSPS that it's not working, it's not transparent, that it doesn't motivate better performance, and then moves way off its mission, I believe, than the task force was asked to do. It says that the DoD should go back to the drawing boards, re-do NSPS, and puts a lot of gratuitous things in there that I really resent. It's almost like the board members have their own starry-eyed views of human resources and performance management, and they've made their report based on what they think. It's a lot of platitudes, but the thing that gets all the labor unions is that it lets NSPS live. Despite all the criticisms, despite everything, it says it can go on 'til it's replaced by another system.

It's important to point out that both President Obama and OPM Director Berry have publicly stated their support for some form of pay for performance in the federal government.

NFEE's Dougan says that if future talks between the labor unions, OPM, federal managers, and other stakeholders results in a revamped personnel system with elements of pay for performance, "I'd say we'd support that."

AFGE's Gage says his union has tentatively agreed to participate in the OPM summit scheduled for late September or October, to be chaired by former Maryland Senator Paul Sarbanes and held at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where performance management and federal worker compensation is expected to be on the agenda.

As for NSPS, however, he dismisses it as a "cliche, a bumper sticker, by people who wanted to go after the civil service, who wanted to contract it out, and who wanted to lower overall Federal pay." Gage suggests that those who publicly endorse pay-for-performance need to better understand what they are advocating, and wants to see more facts and experience shape any federal performance management program in the future.

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