Locality Pay

WASHINGTON -- A House committee voted yesterday to revive "locality" pay for federal workers, which the Clintonadministration wanted to postpone until 1995, and agreed to preserve federal workers' survivors' benefits despite a Clinton proposal to cut them by 10 percent.The House Post Office and Civil Service Committee restored the locality pay, designed to close the gap between federal and private-sector pay, by slashing the federal work force by 150,000 over five years instead of 100,000, eliminating cash performance awards for federal workers for four years and limiting the amount of annual leave carried over by senior executives after this year.

WASHINGTON -- Federal workers, who would take a hit in the paycheck from President Clinton's budget proposal, may get part of the hit back.There is a move in Congress to restore the so-called locality pay increase, scheduled for next Jan. 1, that President Clinton proposed to freeze.Until the president made his budget proposals, federal workers -- including 300,000 in Maryland -- were scheduled to get two raises in the coming year.One would have been the annual across-the-board raise pegged to the average private-sector raise.

WASHINGTON -- Federal workers, who would take a hit in the paycheck from President Clinton's budget proposal, may get part of the hit back.There is a move in Congress to restore the so-called locality pay increase, scheduled for next Jan. 1, that President Clinton proposed to freeze.Until the president made his budget proposals, federal workers -- including 300,000 in Maryland -- were scheduled to get two raises in the coming year.One would have been the annual across-the-board raise pegged to the average private-sector raise.

WASHINGTON -- One of President Clinton's top economic advisers admits that the administration's budget proposals place an unfair burden on federal workers, but she says the salary freeze and other measures are necessary to prove that the government is also making sacrifices."

Trying to close the salary gapWASHINGTON -- Since the start of the year, federal workers in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles have been enjoying fattened pay as the government seeks to close the disparity between salaries in the public and private sectors.But what about federal workers in Washington and Baltimore? They, along with their counterparts in Boston, were initially on the long list of those under consideration for the so-called locality pay. A quick maneuver by Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, D-5th, last week could help bring the issue back before the Office of Personnel Management.

Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., told Social Security Administration employees in Woodlawn yesterday that they would get an 8 percent raise under legislation she introduced to give 130,000 federal workers in the Baltimore-Washington area a cost-of-living differential.The senator said she also had filed a bill to pay more than 10,000 federal employees who served in the active armed forces during the Persian Gulf crisis the difference between their military reserve salary and their regular federal pay."

Locality pay passes SenateThe congressional jury is out on just which federal employees will benefit from a locality pay provision attached to an appropriations bill that passed the Senate last night.To be sure, the provision sponsored by Sens. John Glenn, D-Ohio, and William Roth, R-Del., will help government workers in high-cost, big cities. It would gear the raises to a complicated formula that rewards federal work forces where private and local government pay is higher than the national average in various pay categories.