Posted on 07/20/2011 1:14:17 PM PDT by Hojczyk
The federal government fired 0.55% of its workers in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 — 11,668 employees in its 2.1 million workforce. Research shows that the private sector fires about 3% of workers annually for poor performance, says John Palguta, former research chief at the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, which handles federal firing disputes.
The 1,800-employee Federal Communications Commission and the 1,200-employee Federal Trade Commission didn’t lay off or fire a single employee last year. The SBA had no layoffs, six firings and 17 deaths in its 4,000-employee workforce.
When job security is at a premium, the federal government remains the place to work for those who want to avoid losing a job. The job security rate for all federal workers was 99.43% last year and nearly 100% for those on the job more than a few years.
HUD spokesman Jerry Brown says his department’s low dismissal rate — providing a 99.85% job security rate for employees — shows a skilled and committed workforce. “We’ve never focused on firing people, and we don’t intend to start now. We’re more focused on hiring the right people,” he says.
Too much of a good thing isn’t necessarily a great thing, according to a management expert consulted by USA Today:
San Francisco State University management professorJohn Sullivan, an expert on employee turnover, says the low departure rates show a failure to release poor performers and those with obsolete skills. “Rather than indicating something positive, rates below 1% in the firing and layoff components would indicate a serious management problem,” he says.
In this environment, it indicates something else, too. While the private sector has lost millions of jobs, the federal government hasn’t shed hardly any at all, outside of the temporary Census workers hired last year.
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
Then contractor surfs were brought in to displace their feeble efforts.
Now if you don't have a good contract you are doomed to sitting there staring at a dumb tube that will report any efforts you make to crack the case as a security violation.
The security violation features always work even if nothing else does.
If you want to go back and thrash out what the FDR regime was doing to the federal work force, fine, but that's not what the discussion was about.
Again, your evasiveness suggests some good reasons to not discuss this with you. All you will do is keep changing the base.
But back in 1940 I think we had less than 150 million people. We now have 300+ million people.
The federal bureaucracy has shrunk relative to the population over that period of time.
Anyone can look at the numbers and see the difference.
Now, how do you explain WWII? Should we have avoided that war lest the bureaucracy grow?
>The initial question was about 2000 to present, not 1940 to present.
Umm, who cares? The years of 2000 to the present are covered in my table. It is not overly demanding to only look at data of your choosing.
However my point was to dispute your claim that federal employment has been static since 1964. You made that claim. I found a source which demonstrated that you were playing games with it.
As for evasiveness, I’m not evading anything. We’re discussing federal employment. We’re not discussing me or you. This isn’t some flame site where we exchange insults. We discuss topics provided for in articles via links to external sources. I don’t care who you are or what you may do or have done. None of that makes any difference to me.
I care for whether you make sound arguments based on established verifiable facts. In this regard you fail.
I have made no argument about 1940. I haven’t brought that into the discussion at all. Yet for some reason you choose to bring it up. I’d say there is where we venture into the area of evasion.
But heck, if we want to bring up the total federal employment in civilian agencies (as listed in my provided table)
1940 443000
2010 1360000
As you just stated, the population back then was 150000000. Now it is roughly 300000000 (308 million actually according to the census, but rough numbers are OK).
So for a a population which has increased by 100%, we’ve increased in federal staffing by 200%.
You know, you really should leave numbers alone. You simply aren’t good at them. You just shot yourself in the foot.
You were proved wrong. Then you made an ad hominem inquiry. Then you retreated into self-referential weirdness.
You change your ground every minute and insist all replies conform to some bizarre, low insight set of rules the rest of us have to guess at.
Personally I am having NO trouble believing that you work for the public sector:- probably doing some job which could be replaced by an Excel macro.
Your patience on this thread is a credit to FR.
BTW, I was not "proved wrong". Guy never did respond on the felonies.
If you take a look at what I actually did I compared FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT over a long period of time (1964 to present) against PRIVATE SECTOR EMPLOYMENT over roughly the same period of time.
There's some change in federal employment in that period ~ but the private sector had a whoppingly huge increase of at least 40 million jobs!
The change in federal employment is of less magnitude than the rounding factor for private sector employment.
In short, whatever the federales were doing, they did it without much change in personnel complement ~ which, as I explain later in response to another ridiculous charge, was because the federal government in all sectors and departments became heavily computerized.
So far you haven't proved a thing that you claim you proved. Just wind
Your post at #40 covers 1940 on. My post at #31 starts at 1962.
Your reference DID NOT INCLUDE the Postal Service. That fact is stated AT THE TOP OF THE CHART.
You are not using the same numbers.
Umm, no.
My numbers are quite clear. They also clear up your issue about the postal service, since it really is fairly irrelevant to the point I am making (maybe the USPS has become massively more efficient, I can’t say as I don’t have fine grained enough numbers to make a case). As can be seen on my table the decrease in DoD employees was offset by the increase at civilian agencies. That is a simple fact. Unless you think the numbers I’m using, provided by the federal government are a lie, then my point is made. Non defense jobs have expanded over the time between 1964 and 2010 by 59%. That is an indisputable fact (which you don’t see to care for, so you don’t recognize it).
Over that time period the population of the country went up 58%. That’s the relevant number, not private sector employment vs public sector employment. Federal agencies serve the entire population, not just the working population. So it took a 59% increase in civilian workers to manage a 58% increase in population. That sounds like slipping productivity to me. That is, mind you, in the face of computerization.
Now it is interesting that you would bring up the private sector by comparison (though I suppose that is the whole point here after all). Though your numbers appear to be wrong in any case, even there.
from ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.ceseeb1.txt
and http://www.data360.org/dataset.aspx?Data_Set_Id=354
There were more than 40 million jobs created between 1964 and 2010. More like 60 million. The increase was a bit over 120%
Now let’s look at GDP growth over that period so we can measure productivity increase.
1964 $3.338 trillion
2010 $13.380 trillion
which is a 300% increase.
Private sector workers increased productivity massively, while federal civilian department workers appear to be flat.
Gee, I wonder how well that correlates to the fact that federal employees don’t get fired for incompetence?
>Your post at #40 covers 1940 on. My post at #31 starts at 1962.
I don’t really care where the tables start or finish. I’ve picked particular years and dealt with those. The starting year of 1964 was defined in one of your posts:
>Another thought for everyone is that total federal employment hasn’t changed very much since 1964. It’s sometimes gone up a few thousand, and then down a few thousand.
You chose that year, and I have merely provided relevant data. You can ignore the rest of the chart if you like. Though it’s not like the years in question have any particularly anomalous numbers. They are within the trends. The final year is 2010 which if, of course the most recent data available.
BTW, interesting note on the stuff before 1953 ~ it's all estimates. They apparently never kept track of how many federal employees there were.
Just on a lark I decided to look up USPS employment.
from http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CCkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usps.com%2Fpostalhistory%2F_pdf%2FEmployees1926to2009.pdf&rct=j&q=USPS%20total%20employment%20by%20year&ei=wpkoTp2QGIOxsAK8nqA7&usg=AFQjCNEdATFrpLtIiF8Xs7WYiawh9iAVpg&sig2=JNZNxR63wjO1p1lKUBOzEQ
(ugly isn’t it? it’s the link to download a pdf)
USPS total employment:
1964 440759
2009 623129
That’s roughly a 40% increase. So with a 58% increase in population, they have increased in productivity. Of course the increase is nothing like that of the private sector, but who’s counting. It is, however, a lot better than other civilian agencies.
Again, however, your claim that federal employment has been static since 1964 is proven to be deceptive.
It's been up over 600,000, and it's gone down from that.
The important characteristic is that PRODUCTIVITY ~ pieces of mail handled per employee ~ CLIMBED 700% from 1966 to 2004 (which is the part I'm responsible for).
Without the adoption of modern methods, intense use of computers to control every aspect of the business, and the use of OCR technology it couldn't have been done.
BTW, the Post Office Department was abolished and the United States Postal Service was created to do the job ~ without the use of tax dollars.
That's one of the reasons there are people who like to drop postal workers from the totals.
You are the one who started mentioning 1940. Heck, every year picked outside of the article which started this thread was your choice.
The article deals with a span of 2000-2010 (iirc). It talks about federal employees not being fired. If you can provide statistics which prove that the writer is lying, feel free. I doubt you will succeed since the writer would have to be a moron to publish something with false statistics one a subject which is easily verified.
You claimed that federal employment was relatively static between 1964 and the present. I demonstrated clearly (and repeatedly at this point) that you are being deceptive.
As to the old records business, I suspect that has more to do with the lack of good record keeping, and the survival of old records more so than not keeping track in the first place. Before computers data storage was a bear.
Your reference DID NOT cover the numbers since it didn't include postal employment.
You are not a victim ~ repeat that ~ you are not a victim ~ now, another statement ~ (state your name) did it to yourself!
Well Kudos to the USPS. Bravo that their productivity is up massively.
That doesn’t explain why you are going to the ends of the earth to defend the other federal agencies.
As to why people drop the USPS from the total is that it’s not exactly a federal agency. It is an independent agency which doesn’t work off of tax dollars. As such it has appreciably more incentive to live within its means and increase productivity than actual federal agencies. Those places can just whine for more tax dollars when they need something.
The main thing the USPS gets from the feds is the exclusive rights to carry first class mail. Of course that’s not quite worth what it once was.
As I said, the USPS is not a federal agency. It is independent and self funded. As such, it is correct to exclude it from that sort of analysis.
The employees retire on federal retirement. They are subject to all the ethical laws affecting all federal employees.
In general kids are simply not hired and by the time they're an average age of 35 they've already demonstrated whether or not they're going to be the sort of folks who get convicted of felonies.
BTW, I would suggest that any professor at San Francisco State is probably a loser who will say anything for money. Wouldn't trust those guys to lead me across the street to get a beer .
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