When I worked for a utility company, myself and 4 other techs were overseen by 2 supervisors, who each had a different supervisor, then there was a co-manager and a general manager of the location. I don’t know the org chart well above that, but there were bigwigs aplenty that came through and made speeches or ran meetings. I would be surprised if it were only 5 layers deep before you got into the executives, at which time, I have no idea how deep that org chart would go.
This was of course, private sector, though as a government enabled “natural” monopoly.
“Government Workers” is a meaningless term, given that in the U.S. this could mean an employee with a state, county, municipal, or federal government, which share little in terms of work culture or HR practices. Even in the federal government alone, there’s a huge difference between an employee in a US attorneys office and one in the veterans affairs department.
I have a, um, friend who works for the government. According to him, the biggest problem is that a corrupt, lazy, and/or under-performing person can’t be fired. This leads to the inevitable result of government workers who do absolutely nothing of value. At their yearly review, they simply take credit for the things their onsite contractor has done.
As a fan of Wodehouse I looked this up and found a transcription of the story on Orangeblog.
I am not certain it supports your claim, since it’s more of a throwaway line, doesn’t mention laziness and inefficiency, and I would argue, rather than referencing modern office drones — of whom Wodehouse would have died too early to have much experience, it harks back to the 19th century civil service — when clerks would arrive at about 8am to the Foreign Office for an 11 hour day, and the young gentlemen who were their superiors rolled in around 11am if they were diligent.
The problem I see is that you have a continuum of employees, from excellent to barely capable.
When you have a hiring freeze, you are no longer taking in any new people, so have the people that are there. Over time, those people will attrition, through retirement or finding a new better job.
Your best employees are the ones who will leave for a better job. Your worst employees are the ones who will stay until they retire or are fired.
So, given any given hiring freeze, the quality of the employees will go down. The longer the freeze, the lower the quality employee.
Those who want to starve govt because they feel it is ineffective are the ones who are making it ineffective in the first place.
What you have are managers who often cannot manage, they do not read the HR systems in place, it is not difficult to dismiss a poor performing or poor attending Public Servants.
I am a locally and regionally significant union rep, I can tell you now that it is not hard to point to the myriad ways in which managers simply have not evidenced their employee sanctions, they do not return the proper reports in a timely manner, they often do not know the rules, they often apply the rules completely wrongly, and often the failing employee has been put into a role for which they were never trained - with constant reorganisations in interference from departmental heads at the behest of politicians, this is common indeed.
Many is the time I have thought to myself that the manager may well have good cause to dismiss a person, however the manager has done something dumb - you cannot chew out a person inappropriately - nor can you deliberately set them up to fail, and if an employee actually raises their head above the parapet to point out that a manager is breaking the rules on some project then it is not usually a good idea to bully them into silence.
There is also the point to ask - in whose opinion is someone doing something of no value? A great deal of work goes into returning reports and figures that managers are supposed to assess and act upon, but all too often the information that has been gathered is no use whatsoever, its simply an exercise in some senior manager, at region or national level trying to show they are ‘transparent’ and ‘accountable’.
These information gathering exercises and KEY PERFORMANCE TARGETS, are often meaningless at best, or downright obstructive at worst, yet it is some external management consultant who has sold a management program that has no idea at all of what activity is really taking place, and has no practical experience of how it works.
The examples I could give you are frankly laughable, I have seen work measured only in the number of staff multiplied by the number of hours in attendance - any idiot can see that this is completely useless information - and yet this information is assiduously gathered and processed because of the management systems in place.
I have seen soft charging and hard charging for goods and services, I have seen minimum and maximum spend limits, I have seen completely stupid procurement policies, I have seen critical stock discarded because of a policy of not holding high value stock - only to see whole workplaces brought to a stop because critical equipment has failed due to lack of that critical spare (think of a large laundry with a 6 channel steam generator - when it goes down then you don’t have a laundry an more, just a room with idle equipment)
I have seen us buy unbelievable amounts of industrial sewing machines we threw out because we refuse to hold the spares, resulting in us having to replace a machine with a faulty needle bed with a completely brand new machine, thus spending $1000s of cash instead of $100s of cash
I have seen three workshops shut down because a PAT testing machine failed, yet we had a spare test machine that needed one part - just a simple contactor that the policy said I could not have unless I waited 90 days for the next quarters budget.
We had to wait a month before we got that contactor, I fitted it in about 30 minutes.
As public servants, we can only act within the polices set by our managers, who in turn are propelled by the requirements of politicians who specify some stupid new layer of accountability.
Personally, I think a good way to measure activity, is to look at the work that has been done, and place a market value upon that work, and then evaluate that outcome in terms of the resources that have been put into achieving that output - I have never yet seen a public sector management system that measures outputs in such a manner, instead you get politicians denigrating their staff for the incoherent systems that they have required in the first place
I think this is oversimplistic. Typically when there are hiring freezes, the economy is in the crapper and few places are hiring.
And that’s also when departments start laying off folks. Or forcing folks to retire. Because when there is a hiring freeze, management looks for any corners they can cut.
It has been my experience that staff tend to shape up under hiring freezes.
Of course, it probably varies a lot by occupation. Some people are better equipped to jump to the private sector at the first sign of trouble, while others would rather not trade the devil they know for the one they don’t know. As an environmental scientist, I have some options–but most kinda suck. I don’t want to work for an advocacy non-profit, and I have no interest in joining a consulting firm. I really like working for government, where I can at least pretend to be objective with the work I do. But sometimes it is very difficult to get re-hired back into government after working for the “other side”, especially if you made a name for yourself. It’s just a whole lot easier to hunker down during the bad times than jump ship at the first sign of trouble, and then not be able to climb back in when you’ve had second-thoughts. This doesn’t make someone a “low quality” employee. It just means they like eating and paying rent.
Thirty-four year state worker here. The people I worked with were, for the most part, both smart and diligent. any “inefficiencies” resulted from having to follow the orders of people whose chief qualification for their position was orthodoxy rather than ability. People get reluctant to suggest any change because we’ve seen what that place does with even good ideas.
And, yes, I’ve seen plenty of people fired. Doing the impossible is, of course, impossible. But there is nothing impossible about ordering people to do the impossible. Accumulated mission creep, chronic under-funding and policies and procedures that fluctuate wildly depending on who temporarily rules the roost in Washington, or the state capital are a fact of life.
As a government employee who has worked in customer service positions for three government agencies, I am genuinely offended by this attitude. The vast majority of government workers are professionals who care about our jobs and about the service we provide. It’s very hard to give good service to people who are assholes to us from the jump because they assume they’ll be treated badly. Those conversations take twice as long because of the time it takes to calm them down enough to find out what they need.
In any event, our bottom line is absolutely affected by poor service. Government agencies have to justify themselves to the legislature that funds them. Poor performance means less funding. Less funding means fewer jobs and, yes, government workers can be laid off. Piss someone off and you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of a legislator phone call, and that is not a very comfortable experience.
So the idea that government workers are rude and don’t face any consequences is bullshit, plain and simple.
I have plenty of anecdotes of admirable service from both private and public sectors. And plenty of anecdotes of miserable service, again from both private and public sectors. Private employees might be slightly better than public employees on average but not nearly to the extent right-wingers pretend to buttress their prejudices. And government operates under special constraints that often increase red tape; some constraints are sensical, some deliberately imposed by the right-wing “Help Americans hate their own government” agenda.
I remember one large engineering department in a very large Silicon Valley company. The chief was a drunk dope addict — if you needed to talk to him you had to catch him before lunch. The second-level managers were mostly incompetent, as were most of the worker bees. Nothing could improve: it would have to be incompetents firing the incompetents.
I chatted with a retired Navy C.P.O. who complained about some mistreatment (I forget details) by a U.S.G. bureaucrat. I interrupted and said, “Tom, wasn’t she doing exactly what she was supposed to? She would have been remiss NOT to do that check?” He thought for a moment and agreed, “Yes.” The right-wing urge to denounce the government bureaucrat was just irresistable.
In the private sector, if an employee gives bad customer service, the customer complains to their manager–who may or may not give a flying fuck.
But in the public sector (at least at the state level), an angry customer can (and often does) files a complaint with a state delegate. If the complaint is bad enough, you better believe that delegate will be asking questions.
Not to mention, the press. If we fuck up in a public manner, it’s just a matter of time before the press catches wind of it.
The fuck up office drones I’ve worked with in govt aren’t hugh enough to warrant phone calls to the legislature, nor do they have direct contact often with the public in a way that requires good service. If they weren’t there the public wouldn’t know or miss them. They are/were so lazy that they were never did their job but the system was able to operate without their input.
Their is incentive in business to quickly root out this dead weight. In government there is no incentive. In fact, if they were fired there is incentive to use their salary/cost somewhere else, less your budget show you disn’t spend and don’t need that $50,000.
I know govt employees do a good job at what they do. I also know there are some that don’t. Based on my experience there is a higher % of lazy workers in govt, and I believe it is because there are no inherent mechanisms in place for govt agencies to reduce their specific costs
I don’t know if I’d use the word “lazy” here. There are probably a higher degree of workers that are difficult to fire because of unions. It could be for a number of reasons so “lazy” doesn’t cover it. I don’t mean this as a rant against unions but I have heard many people in management who are completely exasperated by the process of firing bad employees. The employee could be lazy, crazy, stupid, or violent. The process to fire them appears to be more difficult than in the private sector.
To reiterate its not difficult to dismiss poor performing or poor attending staff in the public sector.
There has to be justifiable reason, in much of the US, the private sector is fire at will - that does not mean dismissals are justified on behaviour, attendance or performance issues, indeed there is no requirement for there to be any issue whatsoever.
So what we have are right wingers trying to unfavourably compare the employment practices of the private sector vs the public sector, when in fact they are comparing two utterly different types of employment contract. This flawed comparison is then used to declare that ‘you cannot dismiss public servants’ when in fact it is not true at all.
What is true is that there needs to be sufficient reason to dismiss, I happen to believe that is a good thing - do try to stay with the program and understand the differences in employment contractual arrangements, its not hard.