Unions to supercommittee: Hands off feds
September 14th, 2011 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
With the so-called supercommittee of 12 lawmakers gearing up to find $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction by Thanksgiving, federal employees and their representatives are worried that their pay and benefits will be a big fat target. And rightly so — Republicans have recently made a lot of political hay out of bashing supposedly overpaid, underworked “bureaucrats.” And though President Obama is more sympathetic to feds and has spoken about how much they contribute to the nation, their pay and benefits aren’t sacrosanct to him — he froze federal pay scale increases for two years and was reportedly on board for steep cuts to retirement benefits earlier this summer.
The Federal Workers Alliance, a coalition of 22 labor unions representing more than 300,000 federal employees, today sent a white paper to the supercommittee pushing back against several anti-fed proposals that have repeatedly surfaced over the last year. FWA rails against cutting or further freezing federal pay, moving to a so-called “high five” system for setting pensions, turning the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program into a voucher-based system, cutting federal staffing levels, and furloughing federal employees.
All those proposals would hurt the federal workforce that is vital to running the nation and make the government less effective, FWA said.
“Federal workers are not going to sit on the sidelines while their jobs and retirement security are up for grabs,” FWA Chairman Bill Dougan said. “There is simply too much at stake. We are asking committee members to stand with our nation’s federal employees and make certain they don’t lose the resources they need to keep our promises to the American people.”
The Supercommittee yesterday held its first actual meeting, and heard testimony from Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf. Yesterday’s conversation focused on how we got into this mess, and didn’t touch on federal employee issues. But that is certain to come up sooner or later.
Tags: supercommittee, Unions
Comments
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Jim Says:
September 15th, 2011 at 2:07 pmIts time the unions actually banded together and push their members into a solid voting block. The only way to send a message to these lawmakers is to vote them out of office. Now we need to get all unions on board.
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IRS agent Says:
September 15th, 2011 at 7:44 pmThe unions are corrupt – they don’t even protect the due process rights of career tenured employees when their grievance is blocked. We need to vote the unions out first!