Research for compensation

In recent years, the Seabee community-the Navy's 'construction force'-has become concerned about its ability to retain skilled enlisted personnel. It fears that the Seabees' expanded mission, hectic deployment schedule, and harsh work environments have created retention and manning difficulties, which will worsen due to recent sea pay increases for seagoing personnel. In response to these concerns, NAVFAC asked CNA to assess whether an additional Seabee compensation is warranted and, if so, to recommend appropriate pay delivery vehicles. For mid- and senior-grades, the Seabee sea retention and manning environments are generally similar to or worse than those experienced by similarly skilled shipboard personnel. Yet recent sea pay enhancements are designed to address fleet recruiting, retention, and manning problems. As such, they will provide a "fix" for the problems facing the shipboard groups, but will not improve Seabee conditions since Seabees do not receive sea pays during sea tours. Providing the Seabees with a pay comparable in size to sea pay enhancement would cost $2.9 to $4.3 million annually, depending on whether it targets manning shortfalls or is equally distributed. The most promising near-term compensation vehicles for this pay would be an increase in the meals or incidental expenses portion of per diem for Seabees, whereas a long-term fix might require the implementation of a distribution incentive pay with targeted Selective Reenlistment Bonus.

The 9th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation (QRMC) is seeking ways to better structure military compensation to alleviate current recruiting, manning, and retention shortfalls. Structured correctly. Basic pay and special pays should provide incentives to stay in the military, to gain experience and skills valuable to the services, and to move into critical skill areas or jobs where they are most needed. No existing pays fully answer the need to provide incentives to take on jobs that require serving alone, away from home. For this reason, the 9th QRMC is considering the creation of a new pay that would compensate service members for the hardships associated with deployments. The difficulty in creating such a pay, however, is establishing consistent definitions and measures of many of the key concepts related to time away from home. Relevant issues include: identifying the goals of any new deployment pay and the hardships for which people should be compensated; defining deployments and time away; and developing a deployment pay structure. Taken together or separately, these definitional and conceptual issues must be considered when determining the structure or use of a new pay and how it would relate to existing military pays. In a companion paper, we examine in detail the largest "away" pay, sea pay. Here we summarize that paper's conclusions regarding sea pay and examine several of the other special and incentive pays that historically have been used too compensate people for hardships associated with deployments. We then examine the availability of these pays to date and assess the adequacy of these pays in meeting the military 's goals. Finally, we conclude by outlining policy options and recommending compensation changes that would better align existing pays with any newly created pays and with the military's primary goals and objectives.

The Ninth Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation (QRMC) is reviewing the role of the military compensation system in past recruiting, manning, and retention shortfalls in search of ways to better structure compensation to mitigate these problems in the future. A synopsis of sea pay is presented in this paper. First, the purpose of sea pay and how it has changed through the Navy's history is addressed: who has been eligible for sea pay and the size of sea pay relative to basic pay and to manpower expenditures. Secondly, sea pay as it has been used in the recent past is described including: the sea pay table; incentives; and, survey and actual behavioral data. Thirdly, reforms to sea pay currently being implemented are detailed, along with the Navy's objectives and options. Finally, the implications for a new servicewide deployment pay are considered.

Sea manning shortfalls have plagued the Navy over the latter part of the 1990s-with E4-E9 sea manning dropping below 90 percent for much of that time. The Navy considered two general solutions: ordering sailors to sea for longer or offering incentives for sailors to volunteer for additional sea duty. Although the assignment to sea duty is involuntary, the length sailors actually serve reflects both their sea duty obligation and their willingness to serve at sea . As we will document here, many sailors do not complete their sea tours, so lengthening sea tours may not be an effective way to improve manning. A recent CNA study used survey data to predict how sailors would respond if the Navy were to restructure sea pay, which is the Navy's primary distribution tool. In this annotated briefing, we look at historical data on the average time sailors spend at sea and relate them to changes in sea pay. Survey and anecdotal evidence exist, but little direct evidence links sea pay and time spent at sea. These data provide additional empirical evidence on sailors' response to sea duty incentives and the groundwork for a more detailed study in the future. In addition, as the Navy reforms sea pay, it will need to monitor the system and change sea pay rates when necessary. The measures we present here may provide a basis for evaluating the effectiveness of the reform.