This chart included in President Obama’s proposed 2013 budget shows that federal pay raises have plunged when compared with raises in the private sector.
Among the 22 amendments to the transportation bill Senators hope to clear for final approval Tuesday and Wednesday was one to extend the two-year federal pay freeze for another year. The current freeze expires at the end of December. The House passed a freeze extension in February. It failed on a 41-57 vote.
Sponsored by Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas (R-Obviously), the amendment, SB 1826, would have used savings from the freeze as part of a “deficit-reduction trust fund” that would have offset an extension of tax deductions for college tuition, offset the refundable child tax-credit provision, provided tax credits for energy-efficient homes and alternative fuel vehicles and extended expired tax credits for small businesses. It would have also authorized the Keystone XL pipeline, allowed additional natural gas, shale gas and shale oil exploration and production on public land, and it would have opened the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil exploration and production. Upgrading the kitchen sink was in there somewhere.
Federal employees automatically get "step" increases within their pay grades every one, two or three years. Those raises are not affected by the freeze. But the last time they received a general raise was January 2010, a very modest 2 percent. If the freeze extension had passed, the next time they would have received a raise would have been January 2014. The Obama budget includes a recommended 0.5 percent increase for next January. In 2011, inflation rose 3 percent.
The amendment required 60 votes to pass. But federal employees took nothing for granted. Both the National Treasury Employees Union and the American Federation of Government Employees objected. In a letter to Senators Monday, AFGE Legislative and Political Director Beth Moten said that a GS-5 employee earning $31,315 a year would lose more than $3,800 over three years if the freeze continues until the end of 2013.
“It is time to stop these repeated attacks on middle-class federal employees who have dedicated their professional lives to serving their fellow Americans,” NTEU President Colleen Kelley said in a statement Friday.
Indeed, it is time to stop. These twisted attacks are motivated by a general disdain for workers, especially union workers, most especially public-sector workers. The attacks are not new. But the economic downturn has given the right another excuse to take the cudgel to federal and state employees, often suggesting or stating outright that those who are not leeches are overpaid. Far too many Americans accept these smears as accurate and, in the process, bolster the right's attack on all workers, themselves included.
Whether it's public workers in Wisconsin, Washington, D.C., or elsewhere, progressives should be solidly in their corner. Because these attacks are far from over and self-defense isn't optional.