If you were referring to the retirement unfairness for Alaska Federal employees, as I understand it the problem developed when the government adopted locality pay.
Locality pay varies with the cost of similar labor in a given community, so if it costs X in one place and X+Y in another, locality pay reflects that.
Alaska employees have a COLA, a Cost of Living Allowance, added on to their pay in order to attract qualified employees to an inconvenient environment that would otherwise be difficult to fill.
The COLA is non-taxable but Locality pay is taxable.
Alaska employees are not entitled to Locality pay because Congress failed to reconcile the inequities they built into the system (big surprise).
The problem is that retiring employees receive a pension based on their high three average, not including COLA but including the Locality Pay. Therefore, anybody retiring in Alaska gets a lower pension than he or she would by retiring from a location (like DC) where the Locality Pay is substantially higher. This is fundamentally and structurally unfair. It encourages people to move to a high Locality Pay area for no other reason than to increase their pension.
Federal government pay is fraught with inequities built in through the negligence of congress.
For example, professional pay grades are based on the organizational level in addition to the difficulty, education, and responsibility associated with tasks. There is no provision for the value of local knowledge, which becomes quite significant when dealing with natural ecosystems as I did. Employees are forced to move up a level of the organization in order to advance, and often this is not the most valuable role they can play.
Wage grade employees are paid according to the cost of similar labor in their locality. Wage grade jobs are skilled labor like motor grader operators, maintenance men, and so forth. In the area where I worked the guys who bladed the roads made more than I did supervising a million dollar budget, and as much as my boss who was responsible for the management of 160,000 acres of land where the roads were maintained. |
