* WARNING: THIS IS AN UNOFFICIAL, INTRODUCTORY COPY OF THE BILL.
THE OFFICIAL COPY CONSIDERED BY THE CITY COUNCIL IS THE FIRST READER COPY.
INTRODUCTORY*
CITY OF BALTIMORE
COUNCIL BILL R
(Resolution)
Introduced by: Councilmember Young
A RESOLUTION ENTITLED
A COUNCIL RESOLUTION concerning
Title
Salary Parity for City Employees - It's Only Fair
FOR the purpose of requesting the Director of Human Resources to conduct a comparison study of salaries paid to City Employees with salaries paid to government workers in the surrounding subdivisions and nearby cities in other states to determine if current levels of compensation are comparable to salaries being paid to employees holding similar positions; and urging the Director to submit the results of the salary parity study to the City Council within 5 months.
Body
Recitals
"Adopting Fairer Compensation", an article published in American City and County, states that public sector personnel managers are faced with a shrinking qualified labor pool and significant recruitment and retention challenges because they cannot pay their employees what they deserve, and that there are ample opportunities for current employees to find more lucrative jobs elsewhere.
Although in a lot of instances the principal problem is a shortage of money, equally often, employment polices focusing on internal equity, which seek to ensure that similar jobs have similar salaries regardless of departmental affiliation or other factors, lead to traditional classification systems that ignore the 2 primary factors that drive today's labor economics: productivity (i.e., employee performance) and the relevant market for the employee's function.
To combat employee dissatisfaction and to retain workers by providing parity with private sector employees and employees of similar government systems, many cities and counties have developed alternative compensation systems. The most common of these is "broadbanding" - the term for a hybrid of various flexible compensation and benefits components, with no identical implementations but with 3 common themes:
1. Departmental management is responsible for developing an appropriate compensation strategy and for then making salary recommendations within the department's budgetary parameters.
2. The local government recognizes the existence of a relationship between individual performance and the employee's relevant market value, no raises are given purely for market reasons or solely for reasons of merit, and every raise is justified by the employees performance and represents a reasonable career progression through the market range for that job.
3. The employee's working title is assigned by the department and does not have to be the same as that of the "band" established for market comparison purposes by the personnel department.
Other subdivisions in Maryland face similar problems of assuring that their employees are fairly compensated for their work. To facilitate a system of parity, the Compensation Survey of Maryland Local Government is published biennially as a joint project of the Maryland Association of Counties (MACo), the Maryland Municipal League (MML), and the Institute for Governmental Service (IGS), University of Maryland at College Park that contains information on employees salaries at the municipal and county level.
While "broadbanding" may not be the appropriate way for Baltimore City to establish a fairer employee compensation system, something must be done to ensure that we are able to retain and recruit a work force to keep pace with the needs of an evolving city - a comparison of our City employee's salary with those in surrounding subdivisions and nearby cities such as Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. will provide a basis from which to build a system based of fair compensation and salary parity.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF BALTIMORE, That the Director of Human Resources is requested to conduct a comparison study of salaries paid to City Employees with salaries paid to government workers in the surrounding subdivisions and nearby cities in other states to determine if current levels of compensation are comparable to salaries being paid to employees holding similar positions; and urging the Director to submit the results of the salary parity study to the City Council within 5 months.
AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That a copy of this Resolution be sent to the Mayor, the Director of Human Resources, the Labor Commissioner, the governing bodies of AFSCME Locals 44, 558, and 2202, the City Union of Baltimore, the Fire Fighters Union, the Fire Officers Union, the Fraternal Order of Police, and the Managerial and Professional Society, and the Mayor's Legislative Liaison to the City Council.
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