Inflated Grades

...a few classifiers oversee unusually technical or varied jobs and may cover as few as 500...

...The bulk of the civil service is in the lower and middle grades...

...I have had no meaningful work to do since June 1965 and my present annual salary is $29,168...

...Within each grade there are ten “longevity levels,” each at a progressively higher salary...

...The civil service is a system promoting random growth that may or may not fit in with the overall plans of management...

...New sections and new jobs are perpetually springing up...

...The line of a graph charting the rise in payroll costs for all federal workers looks like the trajectory of a rocket launch...

...Effectively, they do nothing, but for eight hours a day they at least maintain the appearance of activity...

...Everybody knows that the civil service was originally set up to get the hacks out of government, which it has done...

...There are now 300,000 workers in these four civil service grades-that’s more than the total population of Birmingham, Alabama or Tucson, Arizona-all of whom make between $20,442 and $43,923 a year...

...The idea of comparability, so reasonable on paper, not only is distorted in practice...

...It stands to reason that an administrative employee entering the government at grade 5 would move up the grades one by one, but that isn’t the way it works...

...If he does nothing, the raises go into effect every October...

...Some classifiers are responsible for as many as 4,000 low-level jobs...

...A classifier is an administrative employee, typically a grade 11...

...It would be hard to imagine a system that more effectively encouraged people’s natural inclination toward empire building...

...The increase in grade 13s has affected not just government’s cost, but its size as well...

...Some agencies have permissive classifiers who approve supervisors’ plans without checking further...

...He faces no competition, unless he chooses to take part in in-fighting...

...One major culprit in the growth of the federal budget that has nothing to do with the desires of the American people is the civil service system...

...What isn’t rare at all, however, are the people who spend all day either in meetings and conferences or writing memos and conducting briefings about what went on in the meetings and conferences...

...The lowest level for a grade 5 is $9,303, and the lowest salary for a grade 11 is $17,056...

...Mike Causey, The Washington Post’s civil service columnist, says, “There’s no such thing as a typing pool in the federal government any more...

...Now our new grade 13 section chief must be constantly on the lookout for ways to bring more employees under his wing in order to position himself to make his ascent to grade 14...

...The system starts in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which each year makes an extensive survey of salaries in private in d u stry . Taking descriptions of government jobs provided by the Civil Service Commission, the Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies “comparable” jobs in a range of industries spread over a wide geographic area and arrives at an average figure for each job...

...Because the only way to get a substantially higher salary is to get a different job with a higher grade classification, government offices are in a constant state of reorganization and realignment...

...It’s a problem of definitions...

...From the Bureau of Labor Statistics auditors to the Civil Service Commission reviewers to the agency classifiers to the supervisors, everyone who determines salaries and promotions is an employee of government...

...Behind its aura of virtue, however, lurks the most wasteful organization in America...

...One official of the Postal Department called to say he was being paid $38,000 a year for doing nothing...

...While the integrity of the very best of government employees is of the highest caliber, many of their judgments are subjective-and in matters pertaining to one’s own financial well-being, bias can often be so deeply ingrained as to be unconscious...

...The Civil Service Commission then fits the jobs into the grade system and sets up a new pay scale by grades...

...Simon hastened to add that he was sure this was a rare situation indeed...

...Then new offices, clerical employees, equipment, and furniture must be requisitioned...

...Grade 5 is where young administrative workers usually enter the government, but some start out higher...

...Politicians often present government growth as an insoluble, illusory dilemma: the federal government has actually grown very little in the past ten years, they say, and what growth has taken place has only been in response to the public demand for new programs and services...

...But that year the entire system of government salaries was overhauled, and ever since, according to the Brookings Institution, federal pay has been riding faster than pay in private industry...

...That kind of gobbledygook is used to describe each grade level, and is complemented by a sprinkling of sentences here and there pointing out that “the work of a grade 12 is more complex than the work of a grade 11 .” All judgments are relative...

...For instance, a grade 10 at the lowest longevity level is paid $15,524, while a grade 10 at the highest level makes $20,177...

...But the federal budget has grown in the last decade from $1 70 billion to $400 billion, twice as fast as the cost of living, at the same time that many huge programs have been cut back or ended...

...Until 1962 most civil servants were underpaid because they had to depend on the caprice of Congress for pay increases...

...If a supervisor works up an idea for a new, improved section, it usually entails creating several up-graded positions...

...I share an office with another employee who is in the same salary and non-work category...

...It’s been replaced by a ‘word processing unit.’ If you’re a supervisor, you don’t mind giving a GS-3 or GS4 to a typist, but you feel rotten giving it to a word processing specialist...

...Take accounting, a profession whose work should be easy to classify and quantify...

...Something happens in the translation of this system from paper into practice that results in an average government salary about 20 per cent above private industry’s average...

...but the average is around 1,000...

...While the number of workers in the top three “management” grades has remained about the same and the number in the lower grades has either grown slightly or declined slightly, grades 12, 13, 14, and 15 have all undergone enormous booms...

...And it is an ingrown system without checks from the outside...

...A Different World Although bureaucrats insist it isn’t so, the world of government agencies is vastly different from the outside world...

...When Rep...

...After the program, to Simon’s surprise, he received several phone calls and letters from highly paid bureaucrats who insisted that they too did no work...

...Holders of master’s degrees enter government at grade 7 ($11,523) and lawyers enter at grade 9 ($14,097), so their ascent is even more rapid...

...The increases have raised the average government salary to $12,521, while the average salary in private industry is only $10,522...

...To the outsider, the process by which government employees are promoted seems incredibly casual, despite the Civil Service Commission’s stacks of printed procedures, standards, and regulations...

...While bureaucrats contend, even to each other (perhaps especially to each other) , that these ever-changing arrangements enable them to perform their tasks more efficiently, the reorganizations also have the effect of rapidly raising salaries...

...All you have to do is breathe,” said one official...

...The rise in government salaries is the product of a system that is ongoing, so it can be expected that the gap will widen in the future...

...This has made the prospect of moving up the grade ladder even more enticing...

...so all administrative employees go from grade 5 to grade 7 to grade 9 to grade 1 1 before their grade-by-grade ascent begins...

...Grades 5 through 12 are called “administrative” and cover a wide range of workers described as “the college graduate type,” though a college degree is not required...

...After an ambitious grade 12 convinces his supervisor that his particular project is important enough to merit a new section and that he should be promoted to grade 13 so he can head it, he goes out and gathers a group of grade 9s, lOs, and 11s to be promoted for assignment to the new section...

...While the Civil Service Commission prints stacks of books purported to contain exact descriptions of the jobs in each grade level, those descriptipns are sufficiently vague and elastic as to cover, if the need arises, ’almost any human activity...

...Paying these people handsomely is at least a reasonable position, assuming that they do have very special skills and abilities...

...It ought to be possible to state clearly the activities of a grade 12 auditor, but here’s how the Civil Service Commission does it: “Characteristic of this level are assignments that require the ability to develop audit plans and analyze policies, functions, procedures, internal controls, and accounting systems of complex activities primarily in terms of evaluating the future impact of current practices and proposed actions...

...Grade 13, which had only 65,000 workers in 1965, now has 105,000-a 62-percent increase...

...others conduct “desk audits,” visiting the reorganizing offices and questioning both supervisors and employees...

...the growth has been in its cost...

...Every person in the civil service system has a powerful financial interest in seeing the government get bigger...

...Grades 1 through 4 are generally clerical and low-level technical workers...

...Of course, there are still government workers who are not paid as well as their counterparts in private industry-Cabinet officers, top management, and research scientists-but these are few in number, and they are all on the highest rungs of government...

...And even if he loses out in office intrigue, his salary is not threatened and he cannot be fired...

...Of course, in the struggle over bodies to supervise there are always losers, and some are shoved aside to work on nonexistent “special projects” alone-but the keep supervisor’s salary as a badge of former glories, Nobody ,in the government ever’gets a pay cut...

...The cases of government workers who actually do nothing-who do crossword puzzles every morning and go to the track every afternoon-are, of course, extremely rare...

...Thus over the years the distribution of federal workers in the grades has changed drastically...

...Between 1955 and 1965 the civil service white-collar work force grew from about 1 million to about 1.8 million...

...Since then it has stayed relatively stable in size...

...Another government worker wrote: “You are wrong when you say that the unoccupied $29,000-a-year bureaucrat is a rarity...

...so big government is usually blamed on the constant creation of new programs designed to help the general populace...

...The process is repeated each year and a new salary scale is constructed and presented to the President...

...The civil service is at the very heart of government growth...

...Is it possible to compare a job in private industry, where performance is judged by widely recognized standards, with one in government where standards are fuzzy and unclear...

...One example: a man named Norval Perkins, as executive secretary of the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics, presided over several spectacular election foul-ups, most notably a primary in which the ballots weren’t counted for 12 days...

...In agencies that have strict classifiers, a newly up-graded employee is coached extensively in preparation for the classifier’s visit . Even More Enticing Since the comparability system went into effect, the salaries of the higher grades (except the management grades) have risen much faster than the salaries of the lower grades because salaries for “comparable” jobs in private industry have been rising faster...

...No private industry would allow promotion to a $30,000-a-year job to be proposed at the middlemanagement level and then approved only by the department classifier, a $1 9,000-a-year administrative employee...

...Marjorie Boyd is a Virginia writer...

...If the President feels the increases are too high, he can make another proposal that goes into effect unless it is vetoed by a majority of one of the houses of Congress...

...White-collar government workers are classified in 18 civil service grades, and grade is the sole determinant of salary...

...Is the comparison valid between a govemment worker whose job is totally protected and a worker in private industry who, despite his best efforts, may have his livelihood snatched away by such vagaries as the whims of consumers...

...The average time it takes to rise from grade 5 to grade 11 is nine years, but ten per cent do it in as little as three years...

...Employees of the Office of Management and Budget and the General Accounting Office, the two efficient, no-nonsense government agencies, have put out studies and issued memos complaining that government jobs are over-graded, but since they are government employees themselves, their motivation to push for reform is not strong...

...In the personnel office of each government agency is a job classifier who is responsible for the grade classification of jobs...

...While poor job performance could theoretically cause a worker to be denied his longevity increase, I could find no one in the government who had heard of such a case...

...As soon as the new section is in operation, everyone moves up the scale to fill the jobs vacated by its employees, so more grade 5s and 7s must be recruited from the outside...

...But because it has become so enormous, complex, and shrouded in confusing language it hasn’t gotten, much attention...

...Grades 6, 8, and 10 are reserved for “special employees,” such as ad minis t ra t ive secretaries , bookkeepers, and technical designers...

...These longevity salary increases are granted at one- to three-year intervals according to a set formula...

...His job was reorganized out of existence...

...The new job descriptions are sent to the agency classifier for approval...

...it may also be intrinsically wrong in principle...

...To understand that system, it is necessary to understand how the civil service works...

...Can you compare anything with a system in which people make $30,000 a year for jobs like Suggestions Award Administrator or Fringe Benefit Specialist of Manager of Creative Services...

...The Civil Service Commission provides the classifiers with voluminous written “standards” and offers counsel as well as conducting periodic reviews of the classifiers’ work...

...of the 1,349,104 graded federal civil service employees, only 4,605 are in the top three grades and only 363 are grade 18s...

...The government employee takes no risks...

...And if the public desire for services can’t be lessened, there are obviously other things that can...

...Because grade 13 is the first “supervisory” grade, the civil service regulations make it clear that, except in rare cases, a grade 13 must supervise other workers-and the more he supervises, the better for the job description...

...Grades 13 through 15 are called “supervisory,” and grades 16 through 18 “management...

...The post-1962 system is called “comparability,” and it is based on an idea that, on paper, seems scmpulously fair to both taxpayers and government workers...

...he appealed to the Civil Service Commission, and got his job back and $15,000 in back pay...

...What isn’t reasonable is paying the hundreds of thousands immediately below the top well over what they would get outside of the federal government...

...Paul Simon was interviewed recently about the bureaucracy on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes,” he mentioned in passing that he had heard of a postal official who made $29,000 a year but did not work...