CFPB is stalling your salary reviews
A few weeks ago the Chapter President and Director of Human Capital sent a joint message announcing a delay in launching the salary reviews experience collection form. That delay was truly a joint agreement. Both the Union and CFPB agreed that the form was not ready for launch quite yet and that we needed to reach agreement on a key element of the salary reviews process: the definitions of creditable work experience, which will be used in the review process to evaluate your work experience for 2022 upcoming salary reset. Employees deserve to know up front what the definitions are when fill out your past job experience on the form.
The Union proposed more generous definitions that would give you more credit for your work experience than what CFPB initially proposed (download our proposed definitions and see for yourself). We did get CFPB to update their definitions to no longer be reliant on the pay grade of past jobs (or estimates of the pay grade) which would have resulted in continued pay disparities that derive from the current grade classification disparities. And so we did reach agreement in principle on new definitions, pending our review and agreement on examples that illustrate how these definitions would be applied to real-world scenarios.
That was 2 weeks ago, and CFPB still hasn't met with us to finalize negotiations on these definitions and examples. And today they told us that they will be unilaterally delaying the salary review launch another 3 weeks while they circulate their definitions counterproposal internally among management. This doesn't make sense: why did they wait 2 weeks since they first sent us a draft to tell us about this delay? Why do they need multiple weeks to get feedback from managers? Why can't they share their draft with us now so that we can speed up the process of getting agreement? Why move so slowly when the form and everything else is ready to go, and this is the final piece we need to finish before starting Bureau-wide salary reviews?
We don't have any answers that make sense to us, beyond CFPB's insistence that suddenly they need to get more internal feedback which will take them weeks to collect, which just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The notion that CFPB wouldn't do simultaneous reviews on something that's this important and time-sensitive is absurd.
We're going to keep pressing CFPB to share their proposal and negotiate with us ASAP, so stay tuned for any actions we might need to take together to encourage them to do so. And follow along in CFPB Union Slack and at www.nteu335.org/pay for updates.
In review of some of the suggested definitions of direct and indirect experience for particular job titles, its seems like some of the “definitions” may end up being too narrow to include experience that is either directly or indirectly related to that particular position. For instance, Bank Teller. I have never been a Bank Teller, but it seems logical that they might have some experience with “internal controls, audit, accounting, and banking compliance,” all of which should be considered as direct or indirect experience for Examiner work. Maybe NTEU 335 should seek input from our members on some of the proposed definitions, because there could be things the Bargaining Team hasn’t thought about or have the time to research themselves. We should take advantage of the resources WE have…out members! Since Donna Roy is dragging her feet disseminating the definitions to management, we should use this time to do the same with our members. The more input we have from our members, the better outcome for everyone. Just my two cents!