Gonna have to wake them up to tell them...
Posted on 11/11/2010 4:54:41 AM PST by markomalley
Federal employees would play a major role in reducing the nation's debt and deficit under a set of draft proposals released Wednesday by the co-chairs of President Obama's deficit commission.
Former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles and former senator Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) called on Americans to make sacrifices to "make America strong for the long haul."
Federal workers would face a freeze on "federal salaries, bonuses, and other compensation at non-Defense agencies for three years," saving $15.1 billion. Pentagon civilians would take the same hit, for a $5.3 billion savings.
The federal workforce would be cut by 10 percent, about 200,000 people, by hiring only two workers for every three who leave federal service. That would save $13.2 billion.
The response from the National Treasury Employees Union was swift.
"If enacted, the proposals in the draft report offered by the co-chairs of the White House deficit reduction commission would have an unfair and disproportionate impact on the federal employee and retiree community," said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Unions have "what's in it for me" mentality. If you want sacrifice, just look to the veterans of our great military, both past and present. That's sacrifice.
The 2012 GOP nominee needs to run on a platform of cutting the Federal workforce by 25% if elected. It will produce an overwhelming mandate.
SEIU (the purple thugs) have managed to jack up salaries and benefits to the non-military government employees all out of relation to what the private market will bear.
That is where the cuts in salaries and pensions and fringe benefits needs to target.
"Pay your legions, nothing else matters." - Augustus Caesar.
I haven’t had a raise in 5 years, and I’m supposed to feel sorry for these ‘government’ workers?
I don’t think so!!
Interestingly, that means that if two Federal workers are married, they fit into Obama's definition of "millionaires who deserve to be punished for their greed."
Gonna have to wake them up to tell them...
Look, whether or not the enlisted ranks are underpaid isn't the issue. We are talking about the justification for a pay cut for the federales EXCEPT the lower ranks of the military
You gotta' have something better than that ~ besides when I was in the Infantry we went in at $90 per month ~ so I've already paid my piece of this business with below minimum wage pay for quite some time.
Note, your big unions in the federal government are called APWU, NALC, Mailhandlers ~ SEIU does have some affiliates that represented different folks in different agencies, but I don't believe it has any sort of exclusive bargaining unit status, per se.
You'll notice when you look the up that they are cagey with their statistics ~ they'll tell you "x number of nurses" but not what agencies. Good luck figuring out SEIU infiltration in the federal government ~ and get back to us with some numbers.
Oh, yeah, one more thing ~ the people with the "big bucks salaries" you want to whack the hardest aren't represented by any unions. They are called "management". And good luck replacing them with GS 12s willing to do COTR work monitoring contractors building parts for jet fighters, tanks and aircraft carriers.
They are not subject to union representation.
For the most part they are "top management". You get too harsh with them they'll go to work for government contractors even sooner than they do now and they'll bleed us dry.
BTW, cutting their pay would probably be construed as tantamount to a violation of the implicit hiring contract that includes prohibitions on policy people working for contractors for 2 years, or even longer.
Do it for the kids.
WORKS FOR ME ! Sounds like a plan.....
Officials: “SAVE THE UNION(S)!!!!”
I wish you all would quit lumping all Federal Employees in the same apple barrel.
I have been a government employee for 20+ years, live outside the NY Metro area and make 55K a year.
I haven’t gotten a cash incentive award in over 3 years because our installation budget has been cut drastically.
When I first started working the department I am in now, we had a support staff of 12. 18 years later, we are down to 5. The work of those 6 employees didn’t go away when their positions did.
Taxes in my county of NY are pretty high.
The title of “Federal employee” does not just cover those top tier making 3 figures.
The overriding fact is that on average government employees are over paid.
The fact that the "management" gets so highly paid does not equate to a skilll set.
Coordinating the building of an army base or other project does not need to be monitored by a $150K person. I have $30k per year clerks who monitor the progress of multi-million dollar construction loans and they do it rather well.
We have too many people ingovernment and it is long past time to do some serious weeding out opf the excess.
It is much preferable that your site construction managers themselves be certified engineers in a field appropriate to the type of construction ~ and please, let's have the Architects do the designs and layouts.
Everything is nicer that way, and the death rate is far lower.
Not to be snotty about it, I don't think you understand what this is about. BTW, the growth of $150,000 per year federal employees has occurred primarily from the hiring of people with MDs and PhDs in scientific fields.
We can get far cheaper MDs and PhDs from India under an expanded H1B program ~ or, in fact, if the Democrats will give me an "illegal alien" setaside quota I can get you 100,000 Indian and Pakistani graduate engineers in a variety of fields and they'll pick apples here for 2 years for the opportunity to work just 3 years at $30,000 per in their chosen fields.
Can you beat that?
Time to weed the garden.
Sometimes an agency will have an internal security group and they'll supervise construction, installation and testing of space and materials relevant to internal security.
The whole job will usually be bid out to a single large construction firm (and you won't have $30,000 per annum clerks doing the supervising there either), and they'll complete it up to the point where they've done everything they believe to be required. Then you'll get your terminal contract in place and bid that out to firms who will go in, independently of the original primary contractor, and FIX the stuff his people overlooked, couldn't see, or didn't believe was part of the contract (usually with them saying "we'll sue"). Sometimes, in a really big project up near a billion bucks, you'll have several prime contractors ~ and several term contractors, and probably hundreds of your own specialists and engineers involved in the job ~ directly ~ boots on the ground ~ for however long it takes to get built.
We had an architect's specification book that had about 1500 pages of just the stuff peculiar to our agency's operational standards. If the architect went to that book first he'd get paid (of course) but he'd also be specifying that vendors give us the standard equipment we needed to use. That way 10 years down the line after a transformer blow up our guys in Washington, or a regional engineering office, could talk to the folks on the scene and know which BOXES were in use without having to wade through "stuff" typical of such incidents.
I think you were imagining the COTR's job as being something like what you might have for laying a line of concrete block 50 ft or something ~
You guys divvy up the rest.
As mail volumes grew from 30 billion pieces in the mid 1960s to over 200 billion pieces before the onset of the Obama Recession, the postal folks managed to keep employment pegged at 750,000 to 810,000 personnel by implementing major cost cutting strategies, designing new equipment systems, etc. For the most part the creative work was done in-house by hiring on creative young people at higher than average salaries to come up with improvements.
With mail volumes declining to numbers not seen since before 2011, postal employment has declined 110,000 full time positions.
Total federal government employment (exclusive of USPS) was about a million more 20 years back than it is today. Check this site: http://www.opm.gov/feddata/HistoricalTables/TotalGovernmentSince1962.asp
“Not seen since before 2001”, not “2011”.
Plot thickens. I wondered if you were an apparatchik and I see that I am correct.
Thank you for the clarification.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.