Why we’re not bargaining your pay bands this week—and why we’re happy about it!

Last week, the Union members in the Joint Labor-Management Pay Bands Working Group strongly recommended delaying negotiations over pay bands until after the experience reviews are complete, after which full experience data will be available. Up until this point both the Union and management have used a 150 resume sample from 2019 to project and model outcomes of various pay bands proposals with regard to closing the pay gaps, achieving comparable pay, and estimating costs. But those estimates were always prone to an unpredictable and unknowable margin of error in the final outcome because the sample size is so small, and was never designed to be representative of Bureau employees (this sample data set has no relationship to our pay gap findings, which we stand behind fully and are based on real employee salary data from 2016-2019). For example, the sample data does not contain the race, gender or age of employees, without which we cannot confidently predict whether new pay bands would close the pay gaps for Black, Hispanic and Native employees.

In 2020, before we had even agreed to doing a Bureau-wide salary review, we were okay with using the sample data to estimate outcomes because it was the best data available to us. Now though, we're about to launch the salary reviews, and we are months away from having real work experience data that will be used for eventual pay setting, and that will enable us to make sure new pay bands get everyone equal pay and comparable pay. We need real experience data to make sure employees get fair salary increases as a result of the salary reviews and salary reset, and it's worth waiting a few months to be sure we've achieved that.

We have yet to agree with CFPB on a new timeframe for negotiations, but they will not begin next week. We are willing to wait until August or September when we will have complete work experience data for every bargaining unit employee. That gives us at least 3 months to get an agreement on new pay bands that will then be used to implement salary increases for employees who are underpaid, by January 2022. That means we can still complete the salary reviews and reset on time, if CFPB agrees to our schedule.

Observer and historian sign-ups are paused for now. We will contact those who signed up already with more details. Once dates are confirmed, we'll send out a note to indicate that signups are open again.