TVA to pay typical employee $8,300 bonus next week

Friday, November 18, 2011

photo The Tennessee Valley Authority offices are located on Market Street in Chattanooga.

The Tennessee Valley Authority will give its average worker a year-end incentive check worth nearly $8,300 next week.

TVA announced today that it will pay "Winning Performance" bonuses next Wednesday totaling $107 million to TVA's 12,893 full-time workers. Although the incentive pay will vary by TVA job and division, the average TVA worker will end up with $1,536 more this year than what the year-end bonuses were a year ago.

Janet Herrin, executive vice president of people and performance for TVA, said the incentives are part of TVA's pay-for-performance system and reflect the fact that TVA as a whole exceeded its targeted goals for fiscal 2011.

"We are striving to offer competitive pay to attract and retain the best people we can at TVA," Herrin said. "When we go out in the market and look at what comparable utilities of similar size as TVA, they all have a compensation system that is similar with both base pay and pay that is at risk depending upon performance."

Herrin said TVA agreed to participate in the federal wage freeze ordered by President Obama for other federal agencies last year. But she said the incentives are beyond the base pay covered by that freeze.

Also exempt from the federal pay freeze are the 70 percent of TVA employees who are represented by labor unions. Unionized engineers and secretaries were granted wage increases of about 2.8 percent with the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1. Unionized craft workers are negotiating a possible wage increase for the calendar year of 2012, Herrin said.

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