We (government employees) now fall even further behind the private sector. There is a greying of the federal workforce that is going to have some very tragic results. I know most FReepers will violently disagree with me, but as a conservative federal employee for the past 33 years I do beleive my experience is there and what I am seeing is a mass exodus of experience from the government to the private sector. I currently make about 40% less than the local private sector does. Sure, I am hanging in there for the retirement, but what incentives are there beyond retirement? None! By law the work I do cannot be turned over to the private sector. There is no one coming along to be grown into the jobs when we leave. There are currently three of us in our work area, I am the youngest of the three at age 52+, so what happens when we leave? Where is the experience going to come from? IMHO Bush is shooting himself in the foot on this one.
We (government employees) now fall even further behind the private sector. There is a greying of the federal workforce that is going to have some very tragic results. I know most FReepers will violently disagree with me, but as a conservative federal employee for the past 33 years I do beleive my experience is there and what I am seeing is a mass exodus of experience from the government to the private sector. I currently make about 40% less than the local private sector does. Sure, I am hanging in there for the retirement, but what incentives are there beyond retirement? None! By law the work I do cannot be turned over to the private sector. There is no one coming along to be grown into the jobs when we leave. There are currently three of us in our work area, I am the youngest of the three at age 52+, so what happens when we leave? Where is the experience going to come from? IMHO Bush is shooting himself in the foot on this one.The "graying" of the workforce is very true, but I don't think it is limited to government jobs. I can agree that the government must pay competitively or risk not gaining replacement workers for the soon-to-retire folks.
One of the things that the government has offered is a relatively secure position. You've essentially traded peak pay for job security, though it probably didn't seem that way 30 years ago. Of course, if you're good at what you do and in demand, you already have a degree of security plus the pay in the private sector. I agree though, 40% is a wide pay differential. I think somebody is asleep and doesn't care about "brain-drain". It happens to companies as well.
What I'm seeing in our operation is an exodus as well, but not so much to enter the private sector as just to retire. There're, I beleive, a couple of thousand people in our operation that will be retiring in the next 5 years. They will need to be replaced now to allow for training since it takes a couple of years to become proficient in most technical jobs (and that's with some formal schooling).
I can't put this all on Bush - the part of dot-gov he sees in generally in the offices of Washington where there is likely a good deal of waste. Perhaps he needs to have an audit done on all federal jobs to reclassify and/or eliminate/add where needed. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of operations haven't audited their pay v. the private sector in the 30 years you've been there.