Some West Virginia state employees to get pay raises under new schedule

Some West Virginia state employees will get a pay raise at the end of August, after the state Personnel Board voted Thursday to update salary schedules for the first time in a decade.

Because the pay schedule had not been updated for years, state Personnel Director Sheryl Webb said, the government’s first three pay grades were below minimum wage and unusable. That caused “pay compression” for many state agencies. In some cases, supervisors were making the same salary as the employees they supervise, Webb said.

“This is something that has caused significant issues in state government,” she said. Webb said the outdated salary schedule has made it harder to recruit and retain employees, and some workers transferred to positions in other state agencies because it was the only way to increase their pay.

She said the Division of Personnel had to balance the need for an updated, more competitive salary schedule with the reality that West Virginia cannot afford multimillion-dollar pay adjustments. “We had to make sure the state budget could handle the increases,” said Webb, who added that the new schedule has a minimal fiscal impact of a few hundred-thousand dollars. “One critique we might hear is that it’s not enough,” she said. “But it is a start.”

Under the new pay plan, which will go into effect Aug. 31, the minimum salary at the lowest pay grade will go from $16,008 to $18,249, while the maximum salary at the highest pay grade will increase from $114,888 to $117,182, with proportionate increases for other pay grades. Employees whose current salaries are below the new minimum for their pay grade will have their salaries increased to that amount.

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(Charleston Gazette Mail) (subscription required)