Yosemite Park Worker Pay Cuts: OPM Zone Shift and Union Bargaining

Yosemite worker pay cuts took effect January 1, 2026, after the U.S. Office of Personnel Management moved the park’s blue-collar federal workforce out of the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland wage zone and into the lower-paying Fresno–Madera–Hanford zone. The reclassification drops the locality bump from 46 percent above the base rate to 17 percent. For a maintenance mechanic, that can mean an hourly rate falling from $28.22 to $24.64 — a cut of nearly $4 an hour.¹

The affected employees are wage-grade workers under the Federal Wage System: janitors, trail crews, electricians, painters, and mechanics. Employees were notified on November 21, 2025, and the new rates began with the first pay period of 2026.¹

Why OPM Moved Yosemite Into a Lower Pay Zone

The cuts come from a January 2025 OPM final rule that redrew the geographic boundaries used to set pay for blue-collar federal workers. The old boundaries traced back to a post–World War II map of military installations and often put wage-grade employees in different pay zones than the white-collar General Schedule staff working alongside them. The new rule aligns the blue-collar wage areas with the GS locality pay map, a change the Federal Prevailing Rate Advisory Committee recommended in December 2023.²

OPM said the rule affects roughly ten percent of the Federal Wage System workforce, and that about 15,000 employees would see pay increases by moving to higher wage schedules.³ Yosemite was on the losing side of the realignment. The park sits in Mariposa County, and under the GS locality map that area falls into the Fresno-centered zone rather than the Bay Area zone that previously set its blue-collar rates.

Who Is Protected and Who Isn’t

OPM’s rule includes a pay-retention provision. Current employees generally keep their existing rate even though their position has been reassigned to a lower-paying zone. The protection does not extend to anyone hired, promoted, or changing positions after the effective date.³

That carve-out is narrower than it sounds. A current Yosemite employee who accepts a promotion, takes a detail into a different position to gain experience, or moves between parks loses the retained rate and steps onto the new, lower Fresno-zone schedule. The union warned the structure would mean “fewer opportunities for workers to detail into different positions to gain career experience” and would hurt retention over time.⁴ New hires start at the lower rate from day one.

Union Response and Where Bargaining Stands

The National Federation of Federal Employees Local 465, which represents Park Service staff at Yosemite and four other parks, called the pay change a “slap in the face” to workers already dealing with high living costs and long commutes. The union said the cuts would add stress, lower retention, and slow park operations.⁴

The local itself is new. In a vote held between July 22 and August 19, 2025, more than 600 staffers at Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon — interpretive rangers, biologists, firefighters, and fee collectors among them — voted by more than 97 percent to organize. The Federal Labor Relations Authority certified the results in late August 2025.⁵ Workers cited rock-bottom morale, job-security fears, low pay, and poor housing as reasons for seeking representation.⁶

As of mid-2026, collective bargaining had not yet begun. The union was still consolidating multiple parks into a single local unit, which has to happen before contract talks can start. An April 2026 FLRA meeting was scheduled to move that process forward. Union leaders also met with staff for Senator Alex Padilla in April 2026 to raise the locality pay issue along with staffing vacancies.⁷

The Department of the Interior said it was “coordinating with the Office of Human Capital to understand the impacts and to identify options that may help affected employees.” No specific resolution had been announced. The union described pay as “effectively frozen.”¹

The Pay Cuts Didn’t Arrive in Isolation

The reclassification hit a workforce that was already stretched thin and worried about more cuts coming. Since January 2025, the National Park Service has lost nearly 25 percent of its permanent workforce — more than 4,000 positions — through terminations of probationary employees, buyouts, early retirements, deferred resignations, and a hiring freeze. More than 1,800 of those departures came through administration-devised resignation programs.⁸⁹ A February 2025 executive order tied to the “Department of Government Efficiency Workforce Optimization Initiative” allowed no more than one new hire for every four departures.¹

Yosemite lost 10 full-time staff in the February 2025 probationary firings. The rehiring chaos that followed left seasonal hiring in limbo, and by late April park supervisors offered prospective seasonal employees a workaround: volunteer at least 32 hours per week in exchange for park housing while waiting to be placed on the federal payroll. Workers estimated more than 50 seasonal employees took the offer, signing official volunteer agreements and being assigned to different divisions than their eventual paid roles to comply with Park Service policy. They were onboarded between early and late June 2025 at $19 to $23 an hour and received no backpay for the weeks they worked as volunteers.¹⁰¹¹

The Performance Review Change That Could Compound the Damage

In December 2025, the Park Service directed supervisors to limit the share of staff receiving ratings of 4 or 5 on the standard five-point performance scale to roughly 30 percent. The evaluation period was compressed to 90 days, the legal minimum. Agency leaders told staff the directive came from the Office of Management and Budget, then led by Russell Vought, and from OPM.¹² The Department of the Interior said publicly there was “no percentage cap” and described the effort as normalizing ratings for consistency across the agency.⁴

Why this matters for pay-cut workers: OPM was reportedly developing new federal layoff formulas that would weight the three most recent performance ratings more heavily than seniority. Employees worried that artificially deflated scores could become the basis for future terminations.¹² Some supervisors responded by issuing 3s across the board rather than selectively downgrading individuals. Others had to rescind and resubmit finalized reviews to comply.⁴

Elizabeth Villano of the Resistance Rangers, a group of roughly 1,000 off-duty and former park employees, called the rating mandate “dubiously legal” and a potential violation of the federal regulation governing performance ratings.⁴ Don Striker, a veteran NPS regional director overseeing parks in Alaska, told employees at a December 2025 Anchorage town hall that “people back in D.C. are willing to shoot hostages,” and said: “You can either do the job, or don’t let the door hit you in the butt. That’s where we are as an organization.”¹²

What Workers Can Do Now

For current wage-grade employees at Yosemite, the pay-retention provision preserves the existing hourly rate as long as the employee stays in the same position. A promotion, lateral move, or new assignment resets pay to the Fresno-zone schedule. That is the most consequential practical fact for anyone weighing a career move inside the park system.

NFFE Local 465 is the recognized bargaining representative and the channel for grievances tied to the pay change and related labor issues; the union has already begun work on an Unfair Labor Practice charge involving a separate dispute over reservation-system bargaining at Yosemite.⁷ No contract is yet in place, and no reversal of the OPM reclassification has been announced.

1
Outside Online. Yosemite Union Pay Cut
2
Federal Register. Prevailing Rate Systems; Change in Criteria for Defining Appropriated Fund Federal Wage System Wage
3
GovExec. OPM Moves to Standardize General Schedule, Blue-Collar Locality Pay Areas
4
KQED. National Park Workers Face Wage Cuts and Dubiously Legal Review System
5
Los Angeles Times. Yosemite, Sequoia National Parks Workers Unionize
6
KQED. Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon Workers Unionize Amid Fears of Further Firings
7
NFFE Local 465. NFFE Local 465 Update
8
NPCA. House Rejects Deep Funding Cuts to National Parks Amid Staffing Crisis
9
New York Times. Trump Cuts National Parks
10
NPR. Yosemite Employees Worked for Weeks With No Pay Before the Government Hired Them
11
LAist. Yosemite Employees Worked for Weeks With No Pay Before the Government Hired Them
12
The Intercept. NPS National Park Service Employees Cuts