You go GIRL!

Did you see the news?

The union representing the Treasury employees won a victory in court on the latest version of the pay tables. You can see it here.

You go Colleen Kelley!!

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which led a group of five unions that sued DHS.

Here's the real money quote from the piece...

A federal appeals court delivered another legal blow to the Bush administration's broad plan to overhaul the federal employee personnel system, ruling yesterday that the proposed changes would illegally limit the scope of collective bargaining....Elated union leaders said the decision could scuttle the broader attempt to replace the 15-grade General Schedule pay system with one that has wide salary ranges known as pay bands, and to more strongly tie annual raises to performance evaluations. The administration hopes to expand the proposed DHS system throughout the federal government.

The Bush administration doesn't care about workers, their families, their retirement or their ability to move up any employment ladder. They want the ability to nimbly and arbitrarily divide employees the way they do now with exempted employees.

A few years ago, The Washington Post provided a site that allowed you to look up the bonus given to all federal employees. That year, a friend of mine had created an amazing Access based computer program that tracked cases. It was dynamic. It made it possible for managers to have at their finger tips the ability to analyze case performance, not just worker performance. It was really cutting edge. My friend is in a regional office. He received $1000. Originally, the request was for $5000. The director of the nationwide service (the service has about 500 employees nationwide) that he works for received $35,000 in bonus plus a "step" increase as an SESer.

So tell me, again, how a program that is based on arbitrary performance evaluations in much the same way current bonus systems are, does a better job with workloads and efficiency than the current system. Tell me. This new pay banding concept isn't the problem here, it's the way arbitrary performance evals are used. Before altering the current structure, how about really looking at how these evals are written and used? How about taking a real look at hiring practices and how it is that so many jobs are preselected before postings are listed?

If you really want to overhaul the system, there's way more to it than just the schedules. Without the other pieces, it's not much more useful than darning a sock; it might last a few days, but even in the short term it's still going to unravel and in the long run, you still need more than just a little thread.