do I really have to say it???
There is a “drumbeat” of negativity, “ritual denunciation,” and “bashing” of federal workers.
So quit your job and get one where you are a positive influence on the economy.
do I really have to say it??? There are lots of stupid and lazy feds whose production and quality would increase if there was fear of the pink slip.
Given the results of their work, we should be glad they aren’t doing more.
Congress writes vast and vague laws directing executive departments to establish armies of monkeys with typewriters to fulfill vague mandates and an insatable appetite for endless form filing. It doesn’t matter how many hours they work. They are hired for quantity, not efficiency.
There’s an easy answer to overworked and underpaid - - - get a different job or start your own business.
The difficulty with these sorts of articles is that, while there is a bunch of truth in it in certain areas, it is false in others.
That is, the fed workforce includes “jobs” covering the entire gamut of services from secretarial to engineering to veterinarian to medical to accounting etc. Some job categories are grossly overpaid, some are comparable to private sector and some are below private sector.
Usually these sorts of studies take the average fed wage and compare it to the average private sector wage. In which case the feds always look overpaid. And the truth is that many feds are overpaid, and most federal jobs should not even exist (Dept of education for example).
I’d like to see a comparison of, say, engineering jobs in DOD vs engineering in the private sector. Or accounting jobs in Education vs accounting in the private sector. Break it down by career fields and see where the cutting should be done.
From where does this “right to a permanent, full-time job” come? In the private sector, businesses expand and contract all the time, according to market cycles. It stinks for employees, but occasionally, private sector employees are laid off. This is the way things work. If you don’t like it, get some skills that allow you to move between jobs more easily.
Compare the lousy job they do, the luxurious (union-guarded) benefits they receive, and their generally lower levels of competence and productivity and you’ll see that even if they were on par with the private sector, they are still. being paid far too much.
“Government worker” is an oxymoron. It’s more like “outcall welfare.”
When a buddy of mine graduated from MIT, he went to work for another Army facility, the old Watertown Arsenal. He worked with a guy who spent all day doing the NYT crossword puzzle. Another guy slept at his desk. At the end of the year, they would exhaust their budget on million-dollar testing equipment that would sit idle.
Reagan threatened to shutter the Arsenal. There was a great hue and cry in the media. My friend laughed when Tip O'Neill was interviewed in front of the building, describing it as a vital facility.
In the end, the base commission closed it. Now it's a shopping mall.
I suspect that these facilities are tight ships in comparison to the rest of the government.
Let it burn.
At the core, much (not all) federal employment is just another form of government welfare - another way for the federal government to get people addicted to living on the government teat.
There are a lot of government employees who do work hard and who do accomplish something of value. But there are many more who do little of value to the taxpayer or the nation.
And there are a great number engaged in busy-work or carrying out a political agenda who are a nuisance and a drag on the nation and the economy.
As an example - the Energy Department was created in 1977 with the intent of making America more energy independant and less reliant on foreign oil. Today, after 36 years, we are even more reliant on foreign oil. The DOE has squandered trilions of dollars on alternate energy boondoggles and created thousands of regulations that hurt the economy and make products more complicated and costly.
They spend their time slowing down innovation and productivity and making life more difficult for businesses and individual Americans.
Postal workers are regularly fired and then prosecuted for infractions not even thought of as infractions in the private sector. GIs undergo nonjudicial punishment all the the time. And there's what's called 'borderline personality disorder' ~ whereas the military will get rid of you fast with that one, it's usually grounds for promotion in the higher ranks of management in the private sector.
Most government employees are postal workers and soldiers, sailers, marines, airmen BTW.
Thanks to the unions, it is nearly impossible to get rid of poor quality workers. They are entrenched for life, if they choose.
It took a while for me to realize they weren't talking about teaching 10 classes of 3 hours each per week. They meant that I had to be on campus or working from home for 30 hours each week. My teaching schedule would be 16 hours per week (four classes of four hours each).
And I would only have to do that for the 34 weeks per year that faculty is required to be on campus. All for a starting salary of $48,800.
Oh, and the school is suggesting to each of its instructors that we contact our state legislature to increase funding for the community colleges because they can't make it on the current funding.
Bump
Plus, to fire a civilian employee is nearly impossible. First, You have to counsel them on what their failure is. Then you have to give them like 6 months to improve. If they still have not improved, you have to counsel them again and again give them an amount of time to improve. By the time you go through all these steps, you are probably, as the military supervisor of this dud of an employee, sent on to another assignment. EVERYTHING against that employee STOPS!!!! New person comes in to replace you and has to come to the opinion on his own that this person is a dud. You cannot even leave a file of what you were doing against this person for the next boss. The new boss has to determine the employee a dud and the entire ball has to start AT THE BEGINNNING to start rolling again. Same system, same results. Military person leaves, dud stays in job until he retires. This is a system, written by and formed by and administered by civilians to protect their own. In my 20 plus years of service, I saw tons of times where actions were started against dud civilian employees. IN THOSE YEARS, I NEVER SAW ONE FIRED. Not one!
It is also a liberal sick leave and vacation policy with 4 hours of vacation and 4 hours sick leave that are earned each 40 hours. Most of it can be carried over from year-to-year.
For a 2000 hour work year that is 25 days vacation and 25 days sick leave. Growing up in a civil service household vacation time and sick leave were never problems.