Politics & Government

Fairfax County to Revisit Employee Pay This Fall

Officials plan "workforce dialogue" outreach with employees to finalize a new pay structure.

Fairfax County employees weren’t happy when they didn’t receive salary adjustments in the Fiscal 2014 budget, so officials have proposed a series of workshops allowing the county and its workers to hash out a new pay structure.

Sharon Bulova, chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, recently proposed a “workforce dialogue” that would tentatively take place in September or October, in time to finalize a compensation plan for the Fiscal 2015 budget.

“Compensation is not easy,” Bulova said, calling it the “most prickly part” of County Executive Ed Long’s STRIVE proposal and this past season’s budget.

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During a Tuesday meeting of the supervisors’ Personnel Committee, Paula Woodrum, president of the Fairfax County Government Employees Union, laid out her group’s proposed compensation plan for general county employees on Pay Plan S.

In Woodrum’s proposal, county employees would receive average performance based awards of 2.3 to 2.08 percent over a 25-career, as well as an annual market rate adjustment (MRA) for inflation.

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The average combined performance award and MRA for an employee brought in at with a starting salary at the bottom of the pay scale (S-1) would be about 4 to 4.3 percent over a 25-year career, Woodrum said.

For employees brought in at the mid-point on the pay scale, the average combined increase would be about 2.8 to 3 percent over 25 years.

Under STRIVE, the ending salary for a county plumber with a 25-year career would be about 1.6 times the original starting salary, Woodrum said.

“We do not believe that the STRIVE compensation framework would attract or maintain quality employees because salaries won’t keep up with the market or keep pace with the cost of living,” she said.

Woodrum said her proposal would retain new employees and keep Fairfax competitive with its neighboring localities.

Staff is going to work over the proposed plan this summer in time for the workforce meetings in the fall. Woodrum said her proposal was still preliminary and was open to working with officials to finalize something that would work.

Bulova said they would do their best, but it would be a difficult task.

“I would faint if everyone in the county was perfect with what we end up with,” Bulova said. 


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