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September 2009, Vol. 132, No. 9
Fifty years of BLS surveys on Federal employees’ pay
John E. Buckley
John E. Buckley is a labor economist in the Division of Compensation Data Analysis and Planning, Office of Compensation and Working Conditions, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
E-mail: buckley.john@bls.gov
The process of adjusting compensation for General Schedule (GS) Federal employees has changed considerably over the past 50 years; the change significantly affected the BLS occupational wage survey programs.
In the winter of 1959–60, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) conducted its first survey specifically designed to compare salaries of white-collar workers in private industry with the salaries established in the 15 Federal General Schedule (GS) grade levels that covered a large majority of Federal white-collar workers. The National Survey of Professional, Administrative, Technical, and Clerical Pay (generally referred to as the PAT or PATC survey) was the result of a 1957 request “to design a survey that would provide information on salaries in private enterprises that could be compared with salaries in the Federal Civil Service.”1 The request came from the Bureau of the Budget and the Civil Service Commission (now, respectively, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management). Ultimately, the PAT became the model for future surveys designed for setting Federal GS pay levels.
Over the years, the Federal pay-setting process has been a topic of considerable debate, partly because of the large numbers involved—approximately 1.18 million GS employees received a 2009 pay increase, and the annual cost for the 1 percent of payroll that the President allocated for locality pay was estimated at $756 million—and partly because of concerns over survey procedures and pay-setting methodologies. A brief overview of the Federal workers’ pay-setting process follows.
This excerpt is from an article published in the September 2009 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.
Footnotes
1 See L. Earl Lewis, “Federal pay comparability procedures,” Monthly Labor Review, February 1969, pp. 10–13.
Federal Employees' Compensation Act.—Sept. 1991.
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