Postal workers' health plan betters other feds'

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When it comes to pay and glamour, workers in the largest federal agency -- the U.S. Postal Service -- often take a back seat to their colleagues with the U.S. Secret Service, Foreign Service officers or air traffic controllers. But when it comes time to pick and pay for their all-important health insurance, postal workers laugh all the way to the bank.

Thanks to their contract with the USPS, postal clerks, letter carriers, mail handlers and other craft and maintenance employees of their mail-moving corporation pay less for the same coverage.

Postal workers, unlike their white-collar civil service colleagues, are mostly card-carrying union members. The vast majority belong to the American Postal Workers Union, which represents "inside" employees who sort the mail, and the National Association of Letter Carriers, "outside" employees who deliver.

Depending on the plan they choose, postal workers can pay anywhere from one-third to nearly one-half as much as workers at the Commerce or Justice departments, or civilians at the Pentagon or the National Institutes of Health. That differential will continue next year when the average premium for nonpostal employees will go up a modest 7.9 percent.

That's in contrast to an 11.1 percent increase this year and a 13.3 percent increase in 2003.

Social Security, civil service COLA

More than 80 million retirees -- people who get Social Security benefits, civil service retirement annuities or retired military pay -- are set to get a 2.6 percent cost-of-living adjustment in January. The raise for retirees isn't subject to congressional or White House action. It reflects the rise in living costs as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics via the Consumer Price Index.

Retirees were on track to get a 2.8 percent raise until the CPI took a rare -- but not unprecedented -- nose dive in July, then held steady in August. Result: the prospective raise stands at 2.6 percent with one month (this one) left in the countdown. The CPI for the month of September will be made public in mid-October. It will determine how much the Social Security-civil service-retired military COLA will be.

Federal pay raise

Nonpostal federal workers -- including more than 300,000 in the Washington-Baltimore area -- won't know the official amount of their January 2005 pay raise until later this year. The Bush administration proposed 1.5 percent but Congress is, once again, setting the stage for a legislative end run. If it works (as it has every year since 1993) feds will get the same percentage raise, that would be 3.5 percent, as military personnel.