National Association of Air Traffic Specialists

Aviation Safety is Our Business

Bulletin #4

From

Don McLennan

The Pay Administration Workgroup has completed their third meeting since beginning in October. This last meeting was particularly fruitful because the group began to determine the groundwork that will be necessary to build the compensation system most desirable to both NAATS and the FAA. A new member has joined the management team, her name is Lorna Smith from the AHR (Personnel) world and she is trying to catch up with where we are and what we are trying to do. Here is what has transpired so far and why it is necessary to do.

The team has spent a great deal of time trying to brainstorm what is important in the FAA world and to place a value on those issues, perceptions and feelings. The importance of this step is belief that we cannot be successful in developing a new compensation system if we cannot even identify those values important to our membership. During our first meeting we developed roughly forty different expectations that mostly came from the NAATS subject matter experts. They ranged from "people want more pay" to "status quo" to "recognizing differences in workload" to "getting paid more with fewer people" to "expectations that nobody loses money during transition" and so and on. I would dare say there was little, or nothing, that was missed. This first session was exploratory in nature on behalf of all workgroup members but provided a great deal of information about what NAATS expected from new pay. It also highlighted the fact that our bargaining units is split right down the middle and that just about as many people want to change as there are who want to remain the same. This was all captured way back in our first Reclassification meeting.

In our first workgroup meeting we streamlined our process to move towards more of a value based design. In session two we developed 28 values within acceptable parameters to the memberships. Things such as customer satisfaction, job recognition, pay differentials, AWS, promotion opportunities and many more. Management shared with us they could identify nine values to be incorporated into the system such as cost neutrality, productivity and quality based, smooth conversion reduce and simplify differentials, 10-1 supervisory ration, etc. There was significant agreement over many of these.

In this last meeting the NAATS members shared roughly twenty areas of concern of our members in developing a pay system. Things like keep it simple, differentials, implement reclassification, the need to increase staffing, quality of life issues and so on. The Agency presented us with some issues for us to ponder and be ready to address at our next meeting, mostly around those things that will have to be determined by making choices. I will try and keep you current as we move into our next session but look for a couple of more bulletins on different facets of the new compensation system.

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Walter W. Pike, President

This page was last updated on 26 June, 2000