Opinion ID: 413383
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Meaning of Administrative Action

Text: 31 The MM & P makes the argument that Congress did not except the mariners from the pay cap because it did not assume the mariners' prevailing rate system came within the category of pay fix[ed] by administrative action. However, two types of statutory evidence belie that theory. First, when Congress enacted a more detailed pay system for prevailing rate employees in 1972, see 5 U.S.C. Secs. 5341-5349, its rhetoric strongly suggested that it considered the process of setting prevailing rate wages to involve administrative action. Since the mariners' wage statute, Sec. 5348, approximates the basic prevailing rate statute before Congress' addition in 1972 of more detailed guiding principles, the mariners' pay statute would thus also seem to fall within the ambit of administrative action. Second, Congress has used the term administrative action in other statutes to refer to prevailing rate pay systems very similar to the mariners' system. 32 In general, the 1972 legislation established by statute a coordinated system for setting the prevailing wage rates of most federal blue-collar workers. See H.R.Rep. No. 339, 92d Cong., 1st Sess. 6-7 (1971) (1971 H.R.Rep.); Rockefeller Report at 107-09. While the federal government had applied the prevailing rate principle to federal blue-collar workers for over a century, it had not used a uniform method for calculating prevailing rates. Different agencies often paid dissimilar rates for the same occupation in the same geographic area. To remedy these inequities, President Lyndon B. Johnson had initiated a coordinated federal wage system by memorandum in 1965. The 1972 prevailing rate legislation adapted this system and put it into statutory form. 33 There are a number of references to administrative pay-setting authority in the history of the 1972 prevailing rate legislation. We are, of course, cautious about using later legislative history to decide what Congress intended administrative action to mean in the 1964 Salary Act. 16 But we can and do rely on the 1972 legislative history to reinforce our conclusion that in 1964 Congress considered the mariners' prevailing rate system to be pay-setting by administrative action. 34 We note first that the problem President Johnson sought to remedy in 1965, and that Congress addressed by statute in 1972, was the fragmentation and nonuniformity of prevailing pay rates set by different administrative authorities, i.e., each agency had its own wage board survey and system. Even after the President's memorandum (and then the 1972 legislation) established procedures for setting wages, an administrative authority still had to apply certain criteria in order to set prevailing rates. Thus, Congress understandably referred to the authorities in charge of prevailing rate systems as a wage board or similar administrative authority serving the same purposes. 1971 H.R.Rep. at 21. Second, three statements on the floor of Congress in 1972 referring to the setting of prevailing rates as administrative action are instructive. Senator Gale McGee, the floor manager of the bill that became law (also Chairman of the Committee on Post Office and Civil Service), stated: 35 Guidelines are established in this bill that shall direct the course of administrative action by the Civil Service Commission. The guidelines are not extensive. They will not bind the hands of the executive branch too firmly. But they will assure 650,000 blue-collar workers that ... there is a policy for the blue-collar employment system. 36 118 Cong.Rec. 21,017 (1972) (emphasis added). In the House, Representative Thomas Bevill, a cosponsor of the legislation, also noted that the authority to adjust prevailing wages was administrative: 37 The [blue-collar] employees ... have a wage setting procedure that is almost entirely based on administrative authority [perhaps referring to the President's policy memorandum]. [M]any wage board employees ... want some form of congressional policy that has a guarantee that administrative changes must conform to certain basic principles now. 38 117 Cong.Rec. 27,680 (1971) (emphasis added). And Representative William Whitehurst, who had testified in favor of the legislation in committee, argued on the floor that [f]or too many years, these employees ... have been under a pay system that ... has been unresponsive and subject to administrative inclination. Id. at 27,681 (emphasis added). 39 Finally, it is significant that these Congressmen were describing a pay system based on statutory language almost identical to that of the mariners' present pay statute. See 5 U.S.C. Sec. 5341 (1970); 5 U.S.C. Sec. 5348(a) (1976). That language required the pay of trades and crafts employees to be fixed and adjusted from time to time as nearly as is consistent with the public interest in accordance with prevailing rates. See 1971 H.R.Rep. at 35 (quoting 5 U.S.C. Sec. 5341 (1970)). Therefore, insofar as Congress considered this prevailing wage rate language to invoke administrative action, it would follow that the similar, unchanged language of the mariners' pay statute also involved, and continues to involve, administrative action. 17 40 The 1972 legislative history is by no means our sole support for the conclusion that Congress swept the mariners under the pay cap in 1964 when it limited pay set by administrative action; we can also draw on Congress' use of administrative action in similar settings. Four types of statutory evidence support the conclusion that the mariners' pay system is encompassed by the term administrative action. 41 First, while Congress has not defined explicitly what an administrative pay system is, it has defined the term statutory pay system. See 5 U.S.C. Sec. 5301(c). Therefore, one might reasonably infer that pay systems that Congress has not made statutory are necessarily administrative. This reasoning has a special allure because the three pay systems Congress now defines as statutory in Sec. 5301(c) (the General Schedule, the Foreign Service system, and the system for the Department of Medicine and Surgery of the Veterans Administration) composed three of the four civilian statutory pay systems, 1964 S.Rep. at 1, U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 1964, p. 2730, that Congress adjusted in 1964 when it created the pay cap. 18 One of Congress' purposes in 1964 was [t]o provide a logical and appropriate relationship between career salaries paid under the four civilian statutory pay systems and compensation for top positions in the three branches. Id., U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 1964, p. 2730. Since Congress related the statutory pay systems to one another and to salaries for high officials, it follows that Congress used the GS-18 cap for pay by administrative (non-statutory) action to help integrate the statutory and non-statutory pay systems. This minimal integration at least ensured that non-statutory (i.e., administrative) pay would not match executive pay. 19 42 Second, 5 U.S.C. Secs. 5305, 5307 underscore Congress' design, like that of Pope Alexander VI in dividing the globe between Spanish and Portuguese mariners, 20 to divide the federal pay world into statutory and administrative systems, with prevailing rate employees as a subset of the latter. In general, Sec. 5305 directs the President to adjust annually the pay rates of each statutory pay system after considering both a special pay report and the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Federal Pay, see id. Sec. 5306. Section 5307 provides authority for adjustments, in keeping with those under Sec. 5305, in the pay of employees whose pay is set by administrative action. 21 However, Sec. 5307(c) states that the section does not authorize rate adjustments for prevailing rate employees. The inference we draw from this exclusion is that the pay of prevailing rate employees is fixed by administrative action, but that automatic annual adjustments in line with changes in the statutory systems would be inappropriate for them because their adjustments are already linked to prevailing nongovernment rates. The prevailing rate wage system already has a mechanism for frequent, regular wage changes; if wages were also adjusted when the federal government adjusts the statutory schedules, the prevailing rate employees would be traveling on two income escalators. This inference is supported by the Conference Report's discussion of Sec. 5307: The provisions of section 5307(a) are ... all inclusive insofar as applicable administrative pay-fixing authorities are concerned, except as to certain employees of the Senate and the House of Representatives and wage board [prevailing rate] employees. H.R.Rep. No. 1685, 91st Cong., 2d Sess. 19 (1970), U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 1970, p. 5925. Thus, Congress considered prevailing rate employees to be among those whose pay is fixed by administrative authority and it had to exclude them specifically from that general group for the purposes of the Sec. 5307 adjustments. 43 Third, in a number of statutes relating to pay and working conditions, Congress uses the term administrative authority to refer to agencies' power to set wages in accordance with prevailing rates. For example, in discussing rates for supervisors of prevailing rate employees, Congress describes the prevailing rate personnel as employees whose pay is fixed and adjusted from time to time by wage boards or similar administrative authority as nearly as is consistent with the public interest in accordance with prevailing rates. 5 U.S.C. Sec. 5333(b) (emphasis added). Similarly, id. Secs. 5544(a), 6101(a)(1) refer to prevailing rate employees whose pay is set under section 5343 or 5349 of [Title 5], or by a wage board or similar administrative authority serving the same purpose, in the contexts of how to compute overtime rates (Sec. 5544) and the scheduling of the 40-hour workweek (Sec. 6101). (Emphasis added.) These sections underscore Congress' general belief that prevailing rate systems involve administrative action. 44 Finally, two recent congressional enactments are noteworthy with respect to the MM & P's argument that Congress could not have intended the administrative action of Sec. 5373 to refer to the mariners because the cap would result in a shortage of qualified marine employees. Despite the obvious importance of the mariners' services to the government, Congress has explicitly limited their pay increases for the past two fiscal years. See Pub.L. No. 97-35, Sec. 1701(b)(1), 95 Stat. 357, 754 (Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981) (wage adjustment not to exceed 4.8% during fiscal year 1982); Pub.L. No. 96-369, Sec. 114(a), 94 Stat. 1351, 1356 (Joint Resolution on Continuing Appropriations) (1980) (wage rate adjustments during fiscal year 1981 limited to 75% of the rate that would have been payable, and to the overall average percentage adjustment in the General Schedule for the fiscal year). If Congress is willing to limit the wage increases of all government mariners, it surely would not have balked at putting a ceiling on their pay scale by linking it to the highest GS grade. 45 In sum, the statutory evidence reveals three important, interlocking supports for our finding that the mariners' prevailing rate wage system is pay fixed by administrative action and therefore limited by Sec. 5373. First, Congress seems to label federal pay systems as either statutory or administrative, with the former composed of a few major schedules set out in statutes. Second, both the history of the 1972 prevailing rate legislation and other statutes relating to pay and working conditions refer to prevailing rate pay-setting systems, like the mariners' statute, as pay adjusted by administrative authority. Third, Congress has been willing to limit the pay raises of all mariners as part of government-wide economy measures; thus, it has given a signal that the mariners' administrative pay system does not warrant unique treatment so far as pay limits are concerned. Based on all these considerations, we conclude that Congress' post-1964 actions and statements sustain our interpretation of the 1964 Salary Act--that the mariners' pay is set by administrative action, and is thereby covered by Sec. 5373's cap. 46