MWR workers collect post allowance back pay

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MWR workers collect post allowance back pay
By Sandra Jontz, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Saturday, November 22, 2008

NAPLES, Italy — Paul DuBois has paid off his credit card bills, school loans and car loan. And still has a little cash left over.

"I’m out of debt. It’s great," said the full-time employee for Morale, Welfare and Recreation in Naples, after he and 59 other MWR employees of the Navy in Europe recently collected their back pay for six years’ worth of unpaid post allowance.

For more than a dozen years, five nonappropriated fund employers — the Air Force, the Marine Corps, the Navy, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service and the Navy Exchange Service Command — had been in at least partial violation of a Defense Department rule requiring that the cost-of-living allowance be paid to all American citizens working regular full-time jobs overseas.

A DOD ruling on the issue changed that, and beginning April 25, all NAF personnel began receiving the post allowance, said Biagio Galeota, president of Local 3712, Chapter 14 of the American Federation of Government Employees. Full-time NAF employees of the Navy’s Morale Welfare and Recreation and Navy Exchange in Europe also were able to file for back pay for the unpaid allowance.

Sixty MWR workers in Europe received that back pay, which is tax free, in one lump sum in October.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=58985