EPA Employees Urge Administrator to Extend Career Ladder, Ensure Competitive Pay

Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are charged with carrying out the Biden administration’s ambitious environmental agenda.  

And they want to be adequately recognized (and compensated) for their efforts.

In a Dec. 8 letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan, 600 EPA employees “highlight demands for extending the career ladder pay scale and merit promotions for the lawyers, inspectors and engineers tasked with protecting the environment,” according to a statement from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 238, the EPA’s largest union.

The EPA employees responsible for the letter “point to the need for these changes to allow the agency to recruit and retain the talented workers needed to carry out new climate initiatives under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).”

In the letter, employees note that 25% of the EPA’s job offers are rejected, according to the AFGE, which calls this figure “a sign of a looming staffing crisis that can be averted with action at the bargaining table, where they are in negotiations with the EPA for a new contract.”

These workers “should earn the pay that captures the complexity and difficulty of the work required by their positions,” they wrote to Regan, on the heels of letters sent by 29 members of the U.S. Senate and 81 members of the U.S. House of Representatives urging the EPA head to ensure a fair contract for the organization’s employees.

“More challenging work hasn’t gone away—instead, employees are performing more difficult work without being paid at a rate that competes with the private sector.”

A Recruitment and Retention Issue

The AFGE described taking EPA employee demands directly to Regan as an “unusual step,” undertaken in an effort to highlight the urgency of the issue as the union negotiates with the EPA.

Members of AFGE Council 238 were among those beginning talks with the EPA in June, in hopes of securing a new contract for the agency’s employees, as their responsibilities “grow at a rapid rate following the passage of new laws with ambitious provisions to lower emissions and protect human health.”

More than 140 Council 238 members have participated in the process to draft contract proposals, which “call for scientific integrity, the restoration of career ladders, fair wages commensurate with experience, competitive wages and benefits to attract and retain expert engineers and scientists, and the active pursuit of a diverse workforce,” according to AFGE.

Imploring the agency to identify areas of career ladder disparity and raise salaries by extending career ladders, the EPA employees write that the aforementioned IRA and IIJA require a “robust and effective” EPA workforce that is performing more complex tasks in light of the tasks that President Biden has assigned to the organization.

Arguing that they are doing more demanding work for lower pay, EPA employees say their current work environment creates a retention problem, “with skilled employees leaving the agency for other employers [private and federal] that will pay them for what they worth.”

It’s also a recruitment issue, they contend, “because the career path at the EPA doesn’t pay as high as other comparable jobs within the federal government or private sector.” 

Ultimately, the EPA is “losing out on skilled workers we desperately need even as our work becomes more complex and the stakes get higher,” said AFGE Council 238 President Marie Owens Powell, in a statement.

“With retirements looming, we need to incentivize people to join and stay at the EPA so we can take on the enormous task of confronting climate change. Our workforce is asking the agency to come to the table with a fair proposal for making our jobs more competitive to address these staffing issues, because our ability to meet the challenges ahead depends on it.”