I’m not sure this is possible. While I work in Canada, I do work for an American company and management had no say in me getting hired , except for laying down guidelines and what not.
Most new hires are done by Human Resources , using metrics that may have management scratching their heads.
Declan
Sounds like a terrible idea, makes it nearly impossible for the government to fire contractors.
Why?
And the government, in turn, works for us.
Bollocks. Any contractor worth a damn is going to take into consideration the quality of his workers and the cost of training/retraining. I find it quite easy to imagine situations where a contractor would determine that some of the people already on the job are likely to be stuck on doing things the way the old boss did it, and that he’d be better off with fresh faces.
Remember – most contractors already keep most of the people who are in place, presumably because it is more efficient. The only change here is that now ALL contractors must keep ALL workers. A contractor who says “I want to bring back 90% of workers, but replace the 10% who are turds” is being told now that his only options are to either 1) hire the turds, too or 2) eliminate the jobs entirely.
I see no evidence that such analysis was done prior to the order. It covers nearly all government contracts: thousands of different situations with wildly different specifics. They analyzed all of them? Any?
I have far, far, far more confidence in a contractor to make these kinds of analyses than the government.
Neither of those costs are the ones I identified as ones a contractor does not consider.
This was the reinstatement of a Clinton EO, and judging by the federal register notices that accompanied the original EO, there was some degree of economic analysis. Indeed, under a Reagon EO that still exists, any new federal regulation including the ones promulgated by the labor department under the Clinton EO must undergo a cost-benefit analysis.
But, again, a contractor isn’t analyzing the cost of the delay resulting from new hiring and the costs to government and to the workers of a constantly changing workforce. At most, as you say above, they are analyzing the cost to the contractor quality of his workers and cost of re-training, but that is different from these other costs.
After all, that has worked so well for the airport security screeners
I may be horribly wrong here, but I think we’re attacking the intent of the order from the wrong angle. I think the floor cleaning/wall building aspect is a side-effect more than the intended idea.
If I had to guess, I think what they’re actually aiming for is engineering or science contracts for the government, when when taken into consideration makes this make a bit more sense. What they don’t want is to spend 5 billion dollars on a new military-grade portable super telescope, find the company is being too slow, give it to B and then be back at square one. They want people that, although they were slow, know things that didn’t work and can bring ideas they already tried to the table so the new company isn’t retreading failed ground and costing another 5 billion dollars and another recontract with 6 more years wasted in development time. For these kinds of projects it will, hopefully more often than not, cost less total money and make R&D turnaround faster. The floor cleaning contracts that may cost a bit more because they need to hire employees is either:
A. A side effect that wasn’t thought through.
B. Thinly veiled “New Deal” legislation to keep jobs.
Either way, compared to what I BELIEVE (and bear in mind, I could very easily be wrong) I think whatever this side-effect is it’s minor compared to what it can do. And even for the janitors, even if you can do it with 120 you still need to learn the ropes of that specific place, with a few veterans on hand they can bring their current, personally selected employees up to speed faster with all the little quirks of the location and do the job even better than they would have been able to starting from scratch.
No. The order specifically deals with service contracts, not R&D type stuff.
The order does not require bringing on a few veterans to train people. It requires that EVERY current worker must be offered a job before ANY new workers are hired.
Correct. The order exempts “professional employees.” These are people whose job performance requires “…knowledge of an advanced type in a field of science or learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction; or … invention, imagination, originality or talent in a recognized field of artistic or creative endeavor.” That certainly includes R&D type work, but it doesn’t encompass every single staff position on an R&D type contract.
Alright then, parsing legalese is not my strong suit, in fact even the parts I can decipher… I’m usually glazed over and seeing squiggles that only vaguely resemble words by the time I get there.
So my new answer to the thread title: “Nope, and I have no idea what the purpose was.”
Perhaps it was something along these lines:
Lacking any convincing arguments to the contrary, I’m concluding it is to provide greater job security for union workers and less job security for non-union workers, even if that comes at increased cost to the taxpayer.
I’m too stupid to understand what that means.
Okay.
Practically speaking, this policy gives the government more flexibility to change contractors without worrying about disrupting a significant segment of employment. This is something that a company holding onto a contract can hold over a government agency’s head. With this rule, if a contractor is unsatisfactory for management reasons, the government can jettison the contractor without causing a huge disruption amongst employees.
I’ll buy that to an extent, but there was nothing stopping a contractor from doing this beforehand, and in fact it was common practice. If a current contractor was holding it over the government’s head that it would lay off workers, all they had to do was find a new contractor willing to take on those workers. If nobody would do that, then ISTM the workers might be the problem.
Perhaps the contractors are in collusion on this point. Is the market for contractors perfectly competitive? Or perhaps maybe the fact that this policy is so easily and so willingly reversed from one administration to another is that it really doesn’t make much difference? One policy gives current employees marginally better security and the other gives employers marginally more flexibility. Perhaps it is purely an ideological question regarding which one you value more.
It’s not “professional employees” but “managerial and supervisory employees” as noted in the text from the Executive Order:
Being on the Fed side where we use service contracts that utilize professional staff, wholesale replacement of the staff can result in tremendous disruption of on-going work. As others have already noted, retention of staff other than managers is quite common when there is a change in contractor. Contracts typically run for no more than 5 years, so it’s not uncommon for this sort of transition to take place.
That said, there are always a few people that you’d like to see booted out the door when the opportunity arises. My experience has been that even these people tend to get retained during a transition, but often don’t last very long under new management. It’s usually pretty clear who the slackers are, and the new management wants to start off making a good impression. So the heat gets applied and the slackers usually leave of their own accord as they discover they don’t have the friends in high places they once had. Sometimes they need a bit of help in the discovery process, but the changes usually get made.
The biggest problems tend to arise when the same contractor wins over and over again. It’s the usual problem of inertia that plagues any highly stable organization.
Finally, the market for most of the significant contracts is not even close to being perfect in the economics sense (let alone any other). The large contracts are usually quite specialized, so the organizations with the expertise to carry them out are very limited. For custodial and facility management or IT type contracts, the turnover tends to be significantly higher than for the large service contracts (which are defined as providing pretty much any (legal) services as opposed to goods). In those cases, the market is much more “perfect”, but is often limited by the specific requirements in the contract itself.
The carryover of ‘institutional knowledge’ can be very valuable to the Government, as usually the basic scope of the service being contracted does not change between contracts (at least not very much). For example, if the service being contracted out is Water Service Utilities, you would like to have the person who has held the job for 10 years and knows the location of every valve on the facility to stay on contract. If the new contractor fires this guy and hires a new guy for $5 an hour less, the Government is screwed when a water main breaks and the new guy doesn’t have a clue what to do and the result is $$$ in damages.
That’s true of a lot of subcontracting jobs, though. But yeah, having the person who checked paperwork (to see if we had every piece needed) at Penn DOA be someone on a rentacop’s uniform was a bit over the top.
It’s a consecuence of the whole notion of “divide your profits by the amount of employees” mentality, meeting the “there are too many government employees” mentality, meeting “if they’re subcontractors, I have to offer less bennies.”