the workforce. It was during the early 1970s that the federal government began to be an increasingly diverse workplace.
CSRA abolished the Civil Service Commission and established the Office of Personnel Management to oversee civil service statutes. The Act also created the Merit Systems Protection Board, introduced reforms designed to facilitate the termination of poorly performing employees, defined merit principles (those which the MSPB is supposed to oversee) and established collective bargaining rights for employee unions within the civil service (Holmes 1).
CSRA introduced a number of reforms to the civil service employment process, while other areas, such as the job classification program, remained essentially undisturbed. Among the changes that CSRA brought was the establishment of a merit pay system which was designed to mirror the pay-for-performance standard in private industry. There are inherent problems with such a program since private industry has quantifiable standards (often tied to financial performance) by which employees can be judged. In one instance in the federal government (the Internal Revenue Service), the idea that employees are evaluated based on the revenue they
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