Getting Raises on Track
Geographic pay raises planned next January for U.S. workers here, in Baltimore and other high-cost cities could be back on track despite the Clinton administration plan to freeze salaries through 1995.</br></br>The House is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a budget resolution that would cut spending below levels set by the president. One of the budget resolutions would put federal-military retirees on diet-COLAs (cost-of-living adjustments) for several years.</br></br>Language added to the budget report late Friday would allow the Post Office-Civil Service Committee to save geographic raises if it can come up with offsetting savings in federal personnel costs.</br></br>Under current law, federal white-collar workers nationwide - including 300,000 in the Washington-Baltimore area - are due a partial catch-up-with-industry raise of 2.2 percent. Workers in high- cost, high-salary cities could get additional raises to help close the hometown gap between federal and private jobs. Federal workers in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco already get an 8 percent differential.</br></br>President Clinton wants to skip the 1994 federal-military raise and delay and revamp locality pay. But the budget committee agreed to language worked up by Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and Reps. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), William Clay (D-Mo.) and Norman D. Dicks (D- Washington) to let Clay's civil service committee find ways to fund geographic raises. Locality adjustments would vary by city (with some areas getting nothing at all). They would cost less than a nationwide 2.2 percent raise for all federal workers.