Posted on 11/24/2018 8:52:50 AM PST by Olog-hai
Mark Robbins gets to work at 8:15 each morning and unlocks the door to his office suite. He switches on the lights and the TV news, brews a pot of coffee and pulls out the first files of the day to review.
For the next eight hours or so, he reads through federal workplace disputes, analyzes the cases, marks them with notes and logs his legal opinions. When he’s finished, he slips the files into a cardboard box and carries them into an empty room where they will sit and wait. For nobody.
He’s at 1,520 files and counting. […]
Robbins is a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, a quasi-judicial federal body designed to determine whether civil servants have been mistreated by their employers. The three members are presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed for staggered seven-year terms. After one member termed out in 2015 and a second did so in January 2017, both without replacements lined up, Robbins became the sole member and acting chairman. The board needs at least two members to decide cases.
That’s a problem for the federal workers and whistleblowers whose 1,000-plus grievances hang in the balance, stalled by the board’s inability to settle them. When Robbins’ term ends on March 1, the board probably will sit empty for the first time in its 40-year history. …
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
“Lawyers making work for other lawyers is”...
Something like the priests in old Egypt...Only they can ‘know the way’...and perpetuate their profession to eternity..
Wow an honest to God hard working govt employee who is diligent in his work even though he is totally unsupervised. A lot of others would have been goofing off long ago
Oh, so you just basically suffocate from lack os O2.
Such a lawyer would not be involved in adjudicating minor-league disputes between civil servants and their bosses. The pay of $155K is just about what a low-level administrative judge usually gets in places like DC and NY.
I used to play tennis with a judge who heard disability cases at the bottom level of the Federal court system. He earned a nice living, but nothing like a hotshot lawyer.
Exactly - every base I was on had a system in place to handle such grievances...not only mostly superfluous but even the union reps/membership is waning at a lot of places.
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