President's Pay Agent Adds New County to Locality Pay Area
The President’s Pay Agent issued its annual report ahead of an impending executive order finalizing a 2.7 percent pay raise for federal employees in 2022. Upon the release of new regulations next year, Carroll County, Illinois, is set to become a locality pay area, according to the body which comprises of the Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Shalanda Young, and Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Kiran Ahuja.
The Pay Agent refused to waive the requirement that there be at least 2,500 General Schedule employees in a region to qualify for locality pay. Still, the Pay Agent noted in their report that Carroll County, Illinois, recently met the threshold making the waiver obsolete.
Jon Zumkehr, President of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 4070, praised the decision after years of lobbying by his union on behalf of Bureau of Prisons employees in Carroll County.
“We are beyond pleased that our hard-working employees will be moved into the higher paying locality," Zumkehr stated, "This change, in addition to the 25 percent retention pay we already secured, will go a long way toward helping us retain our experienced staff and recruit the additional staff we desperately need."
The Pay Agent reviewed the Federal Salary Council’s April 2020 recommendations for locality pay in 2021 to determine adjustments. However, during the Trump administration, the salary council did not reach a consensus regarding several technical issues surrounding locality pay areas. These questions include how to integrate recent updates to OMB’s map of metropolitan statistical areas and whether to reduce or eliminate the requirement for a locality to have 2,500 General Schedule employees to qualify for locality pay areas.
When the Federal Salary Council meets again in 2022, the Pay Agent encouraged the Council to revisit these issues, as well as broader questions regarding how the federal government measures pay disparities between federal workers and private sector employees. The Pay Agent did not indicate whether to include metrics measuring non-salary compensation such as retirement and health benefits.
The Pay Agent contends that major legislative reforms are necessary for the white-collar federal pay system, as the system still requires that white-collar civilian federal employees in each locality pay area receive one percentage increase in pay, regardless of the different labor markets for major occupational groups.
“The current pay comparison methodology used in the locality pay program ignores the fact that non-federal pay in a local labor market may be very different between different occupational groups. As currently applied, locality payments in a local labor market may leave some mission-critical occupations significantly underpaid while overpaying others,” the pay agent report stated.
In a congressionally commissioned report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) provided the Biden Administration’s recommendations on locality pay, but noted nothing would be decided until the president appoints members of the Federal Salary Council.
