Posted on 06/22/2006 6:47:12 AM PDT by Incorrigible
Generation Reagan Bump
Bring on the Gen X Union Members. The sad thing is the BEST jobs are now Government jobs and essentually the division in America is between those who live off taxes and those who pay taxes.
Out of 1.6 million civil service employees, about 400 are fired in the average year for cause. We must be blessed with near perfect employees...NOT.
Great, this means that they are going to hire more dead weight in their rush to replace the dead weight that is retiring. Our taxes could easily be halved along with the staff if government employees had to put forth the effort that every other worker has to to keep their jobs. Luckily they do not have to be profitable and can just tax us more to keep all these cush jobs filled.
What unions do federal workers belong to?
Maybe I can give up my private sector job and get a gub-mint position...
The time from announcing the position to the actual day the new hire shows up for work is unbelievably slooooooow. 6 months is the norm and if you need a higher security clearance, how about 9-10 (That’s OK if it keeps the knuckleheads from getting TS clearances.) Industry will hire you in much more quickly.
So, if you want to refresh the workforce with talented people or new college grads. This problem will exacerbate as time goes on unless the Fed does something to streamline the hiring process.
You can take it a step further.
Workers at public universities are in essence government employees. It's virtually impossible to fire them.
What happens to deaddicks who work in higher ed is, a new position with better pay and less responsibility is created, and they're "promoted" into it where they can't do any harm.
Here's one of them:
http://www.afge.org/
This is misleading. For the past 20 years, the federal gummint has been outsourcing & privatizing more and more of what it does. So while the people doing the work are not technically federal employees, they are doing what federal employees used to do.
At some federal agencies I work with, the contractors sit at desks next to federal employees, and use the agency's phones & computers & supplies. It is impossible to tell federal employees & contractors apart in meetings. The only difference is where their checks come from -- US Treasury or "ATL" (ATL = "Any Three Letters" = Beltway Bandit)
PLUS, when federal employees retire what do they do? Become consultants for the same contractors! Federal employees spend the last decade of their careers throwing money to their former colleagues who are now contractors, knowing that when they retire their younger colleagues will do the same for them. "Paying it forward."
THEREFORE, if the entire federal workforce retired tomorrow, the gummint's wheels will keep grinding your tax dollars into crumbs.
Oh, now I get it..... These are among the jobs that "Americans don't want."
And another:
http://www.nffe.org/
One of the side effects of this is the fact that they are losing people to manage wildfires, because it's a summer only job that requires professional level management skills and a lot of training. Used to work for the FS and BLM and BIA and Park Service. Now they've been outsourced, competitive sourced and retired out.
There's no mechanism in place (say, built on the National Guard model or something like that) to replace them.
Some things are going to be hard as heck to privatize. Fireline management at the Type 2 and Type 1 and Area Command levels will be almost imposible to, unless someone figures out how to convince a professional level person at high risk for lawsuit if something goes wrong that they can work June through September and make a year's worth of money (which currently they cannot).
PM,
You are so right. If you ever hear back at all. I applied for a job in Navy contracts like 10 years ago. Still haven't heard anything...
And it took about 3-4 months to be turned down for a museum job in the Dept of Interior (iirc). It was the most detailed rejection letter I ever got- all sorts of charts and text describing why I wasn't going to be hired.
The only gubmint gig that you can start almost immediately is the military!
In Illinois, (where unfortunately I live) you could never get one of these jobs anyway, unless you are politically hooked up with the power brokers.
We live off taxes and pay taxes so it is a zero sum game.
The same is true in primary and secondary education.
Elimination of public employees unions would be a great public service.
Maybe if they weren't so generous with taxpayer-dollar pensions more would stay on the job longer.
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