The salary adjustments (raises) for SEC employees under the NTEU-negotiated merit pay settlement are scheduled to occur in June 2009. Under the settlement agreement, these salary adjustments are required to happen within ninety days of passage of the FY 2009 budget, which was signed into law by President Obama last month.

To be eligible for a salary adjustment, an employee must be a member of one of the two groups covered by the agreement – African-American bargaining unit employees in grades 8 and above (320 employees), and all bargaining unit employees aged 40 or older (981 employees). To participate, an employee must have been a member of the bargaining unit in October of 2008, when the settlement agreement was executed.

The salary adjustments will be determined based upon a similar formula as for the February distributions of cash to these same employees. Points are awarded for each year that an employee was working at the SEC during the period from 2003 to 2007, in which the employee did not receive a three-step merit pay increase. In the case of over-40 employees, an employee must have turned 40 by April 30 to receive a point for that year.
Those employees who have reached the top of their grades will receive a one-time lump sum payment equal to the amount of the raise that they otherwise would have been eligible to receive.

The salary adjustments, in combination with the earlier distributions of $2.7 million in cash, are in the nature of class relief. They are intended to move the curves of average merit pay outcomes for these two groups closer to the curves for unaffected employees who were not in the two groups during the same time period.