Most of the 110,000 Defense Department workers under the performance pay system (NSPS) will see their 2008 pay raise reflected in the check (or EFT statement) they get today.

And the news, according to DoD officials who manage the system, is good.

For instance:

The average Army, Navy and/or Air Force civilian under NSPS got a 5.4 percent pay raise, plus a 1.7 percent bonus for a total of 7.6 percent.

That compares to a total pay raise of 4.49 percent for non-Defense feds outside the NSPS system in the Baltimore-Washington area, a 3.97 percent raise for New York City and a 4.23 percent raise for white collar workers in San Francisco.

Mary Lacey, Program Executive Officer for NSPS, says that 57 percent of the covered civilians got a Level 3 rating, 36 percent got an L4 (excellent) rating and 5 percent were rated as LF “role models.”

She said that 1.6 percent got a Level 2 rating (limiting their 2008 pay raise to 1.5 percent) and that .2 percent with the “unacceptable performance” Level 1 rating will get no raise.

Those at the top rating — Level 5 — got raises of 10 percent.

For comparision purposes, feds in the Baltimore-Washington area who got the highest percentage pay raise this year (a combination of a national and locality adjustment) got a 3.49 percent pay hike.

Lacey was our guest yesterday on our Your Turn radio show. Francis Rose is my co-host. The show airs live every week at 10 a.m. but it is also archived so you can listen to it later.

To hear for yourself what Lacey said about pay raises, ratings, the appeals process and who guards the guards, click here.

Holiday Thoughts

We heard from lots of folks who had to work on the Monday holiday. Everybody’s got a different take.

For example:

• “When I was in Vietnam a long time ago, you learned weekends and holidays were an artificial creation by our society. There was just day and night. However, we knew when it was Thanksgiving and Christmas Day because we got a slab of turkey instead of dried out roast beef and a carton of eggnog instead of milk. Semper Fi to all who serve especially those in the Corps.” Doug Johnson, Denver
• “Federal holidays vs. 9/11 vs. snow days vs. Christmas Eve vs. presidential funerals vs. presidential inaugurations, etc. [are] pretty much the same thing for ‘most’ of the feds!” Steve J.

Nearly Useless Factoid

An IRS employees swears she has done the math on this one:

“To handle the number of calls we [at the IRS] receive, especially around April 15th, we have 30 call centers across the country that house over 16,000 people to answer the phones. If all the phones used by these IRS employees were stacked on top of each other, they would be as tall as almost 6 Empire State buildings. If you use this, don’t use my name. I want to see if my previous boss sees this and guesses who submitted it.”

Don’t sneer! The above beat out a submission from a Patent and Trademark Office employee who said, “If all the lawyers employed by the federal government were laid out end to end it would be a good thing.”

I, for one, won’t be a party to passing on tasteless lawyer jokes.

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