There has been a long wait since the application put forward to get the locality pays to increase. Finally, the Obama administration has officially announced support of these increases for all the civil federal employees, effective with the start of the new fiscal year.
Locality pays have been approved:
The executive order got released on Nov. 30 when the President stressed that this increase is dependent upon the allocation that has been made to payroll; which is a mere 0.3 percent. This decision, as reported was not a very easy one to make because there could have been changes made pertaining to the agency budgets that are yet to be decided for the next year. The president further said that the federal employees have already been a part of many trade-offs made by the government and it was finally time that they got compensated rightly. During the last 2 years, the locality pays didn’t see much rises and were limited to around 1 percent. This was lower than the increases assigned to the private sector employees’ pays.
These rises in pays is going to take effect in January 2015 and can amount to as much as 26 billion dollars.
However daunting the efforts may seem, as expected there is some heightened criticism faced by the government over this decision. Many critics argue that this rise is still not substantial enough to meet the demands of the civil federal workers and that like every year, the employees are being overlooked by the government. This has led to a certain insurgency in the department and within the employees as well. Where this could turn out to be the first step towards something bigger, it can also mean an ends to the whole scenario. Here’s hoping that the government decisions do get effected by the verdicts of the common man.
