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Civil servants at several government departments will take part in a month of sustained industrial action from mid-December. Members of the PCS union who work for the Home Office, Border Force, Department for Transport and Defra are seeking better pay and conditions. Ports, borders, and all areas of transport, including driving licences, will be affected, as some workers take action for the entire month while others will walk out for shorter periods. PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka said the exact details of the action will be announced nearer the time to give the government as little notice as possible. He...

ATLANTA (Reuters) - With street parties, the trumpets and drums of marching bands, speeches and a few political rallies, people across the United States marked Juneteenth this weekend, a jubilee commemorating the end of the legal enslavement of Black Americans. Events started on Friday and continued through Sunday featuring concerts at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, freedom walks in Galveston, Texas, and jazz music in New York City's Harlem neighborhood. "This is America's holiday, not just African Americans' holiday," said Gerald Griggs, the Georgia state president of the NAACP civil rights organization. "It's the true Independence Day, the day when...

Sacramento California’s cities, counties, and public agencies have secured a record tax windfall in recent years, as property tax collections soar, yet they continue to cry poor-mouth. There’s not enough money, they say, to provide adequate public services. Government officials and public-sector unions already have hatched a plan for the 2020 ballot that would dramatically raise property tax on commercial property owners by undermining Proposition 13’s tax protections. But a new report from the Orange County Register’s Teri Sforza hints at why these agencies never have enough money to do their jobs. Based on data from the state controller’s office,...

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D.-Texas) took to the House floor on Dec. 12 to explain why, especially in the Christmas season, a shutdown of the federal government should be avoided. “This is a season where many in our Nation draw together with families and worship and celebrate,” Jackson Lee said. “It is a very honored time,” she said. “People of the Christian faith are engaged in the recognition and acknowledgment of the birth of baby Jesus. It is a holy time. It is a time when families need resources. Government workers need to ensure that their families are provided for,...

In a letter to House and Senate leaders, Trump claimed "federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases." President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he was canceling pay raises for most federal employees that had been set to go into effect in January, citing government budget concerns. In a letter to House and Senate leaders, Trump wrote that he’d decided “across-the-board” pay raises as well as locality pay raises for civilian federal workers in 2019 would be frozen. “I have determined that for 2019, both across‑the‑board pay increases and locality pay increases will be set at zero,” he wrote. “These alternative...

I am writing this partially because I really want to know where the Freeper community stands on a whole on the issue of government workers and partially because of my disgust for certain members of the Freeper community. There is a member on a another post who I won't mention (but who I'm sure will make his/her presence known here) who thinks that just because I work for the federal government that I should be forced from my job and unto the streets begging for money. This person apparently has a very low opinion of anyone who works for the...

At some point, you run out of ways to squeeze more revenue out of the public and reality sets in; the same reality that walks in county facilities and are met with more indifference than compassion, which is why it's hard to feel much sympathy for some of these fat-and-panicked employees that have had secure jobs for decades.

During the next five weeks, the CalPERS board, custodian of $326 billion in assets needed to fulfill retirement promises for 1.8 million California public employees and beneficiaries, will make decisions affecting government budgets for decades to come. The problem is, despite their fiduciary duty under the state Constitution to “protect the competency of the assets” under their absolute control, CalPERS is roughly $153 billion short of fully funding the retirement promises earned to date. How did CalPERS dig this huge hole? During the last decade, they manipulated actuarial assumptions and methods to keep employer and employee contribution rates low in...

Government workers who have leave time are a large portion of the protesters. If the media would do its job, we would have documentation.

Does a Trump presidency mean public employees across the country will be freed from being forced to pay government unions against their will? With one seat on the Supreme Court already vacant and more expected to open up in the next few years as aging justices retire, President-elect Trump — already dubbed the "Nominator-in-Chief" — has great power to shape the future of public sector unionization. If Trump nominates one of the roughly two dozen people he pledged to consider to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, it's likely public employees nationwide would earn freedom from being forced to support...

Big Government: A new survey finds that more than a third of federal workers are threatening to quit their jobs should Donald Trump prevail in the presidential election. If only that were true. A survey of federal employees by the Government Business Council and GovExec.com found that 14% said they would "definitely" consider quitting their jobs if Trump wins the election on Nov. 8, another 13% said they might consider it. Just 65% said they'd stay on at their jobs no matter who wins. Whatever Trump's many flaws, that's an awfully tempting reason to cast a ballot for him. Except...

Government employees in the United States outnumber manufacturing employees by 9,932,000, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Federal, state and local government employed 22,213,000 people in August, while the manufacturing sector employed 12,281,000. …

It's a good thing Trump wants to rebuild our manufacturing base, because it truly has taken a hit. We've turned from a nation of builders to burger flippers. To put in perspective just how bad things have gotten - there were more Americans employed in manufacturing in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor than there are today, despite the fact that the population then was a fraction of what it is today. In that time, there was 1 person employed in manufacturing for every 10.6 people in the overall population compared to 1 person employed in government for every...

Those employed by government in the United States in August of this year outnumbered those employed in the manufacturing sector by almost 1.8 to 1, according to data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There were 21,995,000 employed by federal, state and local government in the United States in August, according to BLS. By contrast, there were only 12,329,000 employed in the manufacturing sector. The BLS has published seasonally-adjusted month-by-month employment numbers for both government and manufacturing going back to 1939. In the first 50 years of the 76-year span since then, manufacturing out-employed government. But in August 1989,...

An epidemic of federal employees watching pornography on government computers during work hours has gotten so out of control that legislation has been introduced in Congress to contain the embarrassing crisis. Porn has for years been part of the job at some government agencies and in fact a number of federal audits have long documented the enraging details of how our tax dollars are being wasted. Judicial Watch has also reported on this for years, especially the porn crisis at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency charged with policing the nation’s financial industry. While the economy crumbled, the...

Former U.S. postal worker who says he got ‘lazy’ sentenced It’s long been said that mail carriers deliver through snow, rain, heat and gloom of night. Maybe that’s because if they fail to do the job right, they could end up charged with a federal crime. A now-former U.S. Postal Service worker from ­Eugene learned that the hard way after police recovered nearly 1,000 pieces of undelivered mail from two bins on his front porch in July. The bins contained primarily merchant advertisements (or “junk” mail), but included 27 voter ballots from May’s primary election and more than 200 items...

Government employees who receive their health insurance coverage through Aetna will be eligible for sex-change operations next year, the company has announced. […] “Aetna has long been supportive of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community,” the company said last month. Aetna is among the first carriers in the federal insurance program that offers coverage for the surgeries. In addition, Kaiser, which enrolled some 240,000 federal workers last year, and the Foreign Service Benefit plan, covering members of the American Foreign Service Protective Association, also cover transgender services. …

The federal government wrongfully paid Medicare Advantage programs almost $70 billion, mostly through overbilling between 2008 and 2013, according to a new report. The Center for Public Integrity released the first of its four part investigative series Wednesday on Medicare Advantage payments that examines the use of risk scores used by providers to charge the government more for sicker patients. Medicare Advantage covers nearly 16 million people and is expected to cost more than $150 billion this year. However, reviews by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have also found billing errors in 30 percent or more of patient...

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced on March 12th that the total cost of employing a state or local government worker is 45% more than an equivalent worker in the private sector. For the month of December 2013, employers in private industry spent an average of $29.63 per employee hour worked, but the equivalent cost for a government worker averaged $42.89 per hour. Not only do government employees average 33% higher pay than those in the private sector, their pension and retirement benefit costs are now an incredible 254% higher also. Given that compensation formulas for federal,...

The latest report from the U.S. Office of Special Council has found some serious waste in the Department of Homeland Security. Shocking! The report shows a collection of data showing that nearly $8.7 million in overtime pay was spent on employees who were sometimes doing nothing more than watching “sports and entertainment” channels on TV. According to the government investigator, collecting overtime pay in the DHS is a “long-standing abuse” and has become a “persistent pattern”. Employees have been able to take advantage of a program known as Administratively Uncontrollable Overtime. This system is meant to be used only for...