Posted on 06/22/2006 6:47:12 AM PDT by Incorrigible
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With Mass Retirements Looming, Feds Talk Up Government WorkBY CHUCK McCUTCHEON |
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WASHINGTON -- The federal government is scrambling to deal with what experts and lawmakers say is a looming potential disaster: the retirements of thousands of its most experienced employees.
The U.S. agency handling personnel policies is running TV ads in cities from Michigan to Mississippi, talking up government service to potential applicants. And it is asking other agencies to identify jobs with enough flexibility that employees can work from home or stagger their hours.
"The JetBlues and Googles of the world are already doing these things," said Linda Springer, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, referring to two companies known for creative workplace practices. "We have to get out there and win our share of talent. ... We don't have a choice."
About 60 percent of the government's 1.6 million civil service employees will be eligible to retire over the next decade, and about 40 percent are considered likely to do so, Springer said. Many are baby boomers with long careers at a single agency.
Left unaddressed, Springer and others say, the wave of departures will make government more vulnerable to innumerable problems. These range from being unable to adequately assist the public in processing Medicare benefits and other paperwork to not fixing pitfalls revealed by Hurricane Katrina.
"The consequences are almost beyond all imagination in some sense," said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group working on the retirement issue. "You don't have to look further than a disaster like Katrina or the implementation of the Medicare drug benefit or Iraq -- all have a significant connection to the quality of the federal work force."
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, blamed current Katrina-related contracting problems at the Department of Homeland Security at least in part on the fact that inexperienced people have filled the shoes of knowledgeable officials.
"We're losing a level of expertise that is alarming," Collins said. "It's a major problem."
To attract new talent, the Office of Personnel Management began running its 30-second TV spots in May. The ads feature employees talking about their work doing safety testing on cars, using computer models to study weather, and protecting the environment.
The spots seek to counter the notion "that a federal job means coming to Washington and having to sit at a desk," Springer said. About 85 percent of federal civilian employees work outside the capital.
The ads first ran in Flint and Saginaw, Mich., and Spartanburg, S.C. Others followed in Cincinnati; Biloxi and Gulfport, Miss.; and the Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa.
Springer said the areas were picked because of their large pools of job-seekers and because the agency could buy time relatively cheaply. The ads mentioned www.usajobs.gov, a federal Web site, generating "thousands of hits," she said.
Among those responding was Suzy Koepplinger, 40, of Saginaw, who is interested in an administrative position in nearby East Lansing, which she saw on usajobs.gov.
"I would love to be employed with a government agency making a decent wage," said Koepplinger, who did administrative work for city government for 12 years before being laid off for budget reasons.
She now has an entry-level job in the Saginaw County treasurer's office. "I went from $23.90 an hour to $10 an hour," she said, "and I'm wondering how I'm going to keep my house."
Springer's office also launched a program in which federal agencies are asked to identify greater numbers of jobs that can be filled in non-traditional ways. The idea is to offer more jobs with flexible working hours or that enable people to work from home.
Some federal offices already use such options. At the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, budget analyst Lauren Ailes of Alexandria, Va., said she and her husband -- who also works for the agency -- have staggered their work schedules since their daughter's birth last year.
"This is wonderful for us," Ailes said. "I get my mornings and evenings with her, and my husband spends the bulk of his days with her, which not many dads do."
Springer said a third part of her agency's strategy on retirements will be addressing how to process job applications so new hires aren't delayed by time-consuming background checks.
The Partnership for Public Service's Stier said such moves are positive, as long as agencies follow through.
But other experts are skeptical.
"I don't think these kinds of changes are going to do much," said Paul Light, a New York University professor who studies the federal bureaucracy. "You can do public-service announcements and talk about how wonderful the federal government is, but most people see the private and nonprofit sectors as a better place to work."
Steve Kreisberg, collective bargaining director for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Washington, said more emphasis must be placed on higher pay for experienced people at all levels of government. Kreisberg also said the Bush administration should set a better tone.
"You have a lot of anti-federal government rhetoric from the very administration that is now seeking to hire more people," he said. "You don't hear the CEO of General Electric bad-mouthing his company and then saying, `Come work for me."'
June 21, 2006(Chuck McCutcheon can be contacted at chuck.mccutcheon@newhouse.com.)
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
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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