Defying Gravity: How You Can Control the Increasing Costs of Healthcare
The average FEHB premium will increase 7.2% this year. What can you do to create your own gravity and hold your health care costs down?
The average FEHB premium will increase 7.2% this year. What can you do to create your own gravity and hold your health care costs down?
A few months ago, a colleague forwarded to the author a number of recent arbitration decisions which had gone against Federal agencies and had resulted in tens of millions of dollars in overtime payments to bargaining unit employees wrongly designated as exempt from the FLSA. The overtime and associated costs paid by multiple Federal agencies in arbitration decisions or in settlements reached by the parties was truly staggering.
This article quantifies some of the changes that have been proposed to the federal retirement system. How much would a pay freeze impact your future income? How much of an impact would you see if the “high three” were changed to a “high five?” Here are examples of how you may be impacted.
In what the author calls perhaps the wackiest decision in the history of Federal labor relations, the FLRA decides to allow the election of a union to represent TSA officers with no collective bargaining permitted.
The co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform released a draft report on 11/10 outlining ways to cut the federal deficit. We highlight some additional items from that report that will be of most interest to our readers.
President Barack Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission has caught the public’s eye with a draft report that calls for freezing federal salary and compensation levels and changing the way federal retirement compensation is calculated as ways of cutting federal spending.
The Federal Labor Relations Authority conducted training on Federal sector arbitration last month. If you missed it and want copies of the slides and handouts, the Author provides them and a comment.
Your agency is a multibillion-dollar organization we all know by name. Any employee who takes a phone call or greets a walk-in is acting as the agency’s sole representative for that person. Has your agency trained you to think of your role in those terms?
Has America become too politically correct or do we still have further to go? About 2500 readers expressed their view on a topic that generated one of the most uniform responses we have had in our survey results–even though the answers were not always the politically correct response.
The new employee probationary period is “the most elegantly simple program we have in Human Resources.” Unlike many other areas of human resources the author has encountered, it is elegant in design and simple to use.