What, exactly, is the reason they claimed they did this? I mean, just so they could have fewer federal employees?
And we wonder why today, people have no work ethic-why should they? It’s all about the bottom line-there’s no such thing as a valued employee-everyone is assumed to be replaceable.
Here in the private sector this sort of layoff is common. I don’t fully blame the employers, because they have their own problems. My daughter is unemployed because her employer, an internet startup, went bankrupt. Three of the companies I worked for in my career no longer exist. Another let me go when they decided to replace the team that I was a part of.
Government workers are less susceptible to this sort of thing, but they’re not immune. I have sympathy to the laid-off workers, but their misfortune is not extraordinary.
This isn’t merely “misfortune.” december. This is some of America’s most vulnerable citizens being cut off at the knees by an administration that wants to appear to be “cutting the fat” from government, but does so in the usual scattergun fashion. No care is being given to see that truly unnecessary jobs be the only ones cut. In the case the OP cited, the jobs aren’t being cut at all, just the federal employees. The work still needs to be done, only now it will be performed by less experienced contractors and actually end up costing more.
You may very well have compassion for those laid-off seniors. But the “compassionate coservative” government and its wealthy president apparently do not.
Mr. Butrscotch works for a company that gets more and more of these apparently hated contracting jobs from the government. I can assure you of several things, from personal observation:
Contractors who come in to replace former federal employees OFTEN hire back the FFEs because they WANT people with experience. IT COSTS THEM LESS THAN TRAINING NEW PEOPLE.
Contracted-out jobs often ARE cheaper for the American public than having federal employees do the same thing. This is because the contracting company has to calculate ALL costs in their bids, and because while their employees usually get good benefits, they are usually NOT at the same level as federal employees, and because they can do things like eliminate layers of management (show me a federal agency that does that!) in order to pay for more worker bees.
Contractors often work MUCH harder than their federal counterparts. When Mr. Butrscotch was managing a large chunk of the computer systems in a large military hospital, while he and HIS employees were diligently at their desks working, the counterpart federal employees on the other side of the house were often (a) not coming to work until noon and leaving at 4 pm while getting paid for a full day’s work, (b) sleeping on the couch in the lounge at night and YELLING at people who woke them up to suggest they go back to work, and © blaming the contractors for anything that went wrong at the same time.
It’s not fair to say federal employee = good, contractor = bad. That’s the attitude that makes many, many hard-working people think government employees are often lazy asses getting a free ride off the American taxpayer. Me, for one.
I’m sorry your seniors are gone. But I’d be willing to lay odds that if the program is offered again on a contracted-out basis, you’ll find those same people back at work in your office, with at least as good a paycheck and benefits as they were getting from the government.