Here's how government work.....works

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I hear many complaints on the laziness of government employees, so I figured I’d explain things from a public employee’s perspective.

Here’s the shakedown on how government offices work: The first thing you need to understand is that you are taking a pay cut when you work for the government. Just about every time. If you are doing a job employed by Uncle Sam you could be in the private sector somewhere earning more. The type of work could be just the same difficulty and yet you’d be paid more. Why is this? The answer, to me, is the amount of work needed completion.

If I am a home inspector working for a municipal government I can only be inspecting homes so long as there are homes needing inspection. If I have two inspections in one day and I’m done with them at noon the rest of the day is spent doing…what? Your skills are sharp, your knowledge robust…what can you efficiently spend time on? You could be sent home since your work is done but John Q Public would have a fit and besides someone MIGHT come looking for an inspection before 5:00.

So going home early is out. Heck, if we only need the guy half a day, lets just pay him for half a day, right? Except who the hell is going to be professional enough to handle the job and not expect full-time and benefits? No one, really.

In my next chapter I’ll expose why nobody ever gets fired. Discuss!

2

We lost over a third of our department in the bad economy. I’m looking forward to the explanation of how nobody gets fired.

3

Flow chart. Nobody has the authority to make a decision. Follow the flow chart. Do what it says, or you will be fired, or even worse, lose your insurance.

Oh, wait, that’s how it works in the private sector, too, isn’t it.

4

Earning more, sure, but what about benefits? How many private sector employees can get an entire month of paid vacation per year and can carry 240 hours of unused paid vacation over to the next?

5

One reason government employees tend to be paid less: more benefits.

A Federal civilian government employee gets 13 8-hour days of vacation (plus 13 sick leave) per year for the first 3 years of employment, 20 per year for the next 12, and 26 per year after that…and you are expected to use them up to a point as any saved-up vacation time in excess of 30 days at the end of the “pay year” is lost without a payout equivalent. (Sick leave is always 13 days/year, but can be saved without limit - and, thanks to a recent change in the law, for every 26 days or so you have saved up when you retire, your pension goes up by 0.1% of your base pay.)

6

And the payscale issue…
I worked for NSA for 9 years. I started as a work study in my senior year of HS. In the area where I live, and NSA job is considered a prestigious thing. No one understood when I quit. What they don’t understand is this. In a federal job, your raises go by pay scale. Your promotions don’t depend on your work, but on your Time In Grade. So ther jerk doing nothing in the cubicle next to you will get a promotion too. For budget reasons, only so many people can be promoted each quarter. When I started as a work study, I was a 1. I worked my way up to an 8. I looked around and realized that there were so many other employees in my organization waiting for their 9s, it might be years before I saw it. Not only do you wait thru the sheer number of people also waiting, you wait knowing damn well that if the section chief personally likes an employee, they get theirs first. Job performance has nothing to do with it. So the pay sucks, and while you’re puttin up with this, remember that at NSA, every few years you get another background check. Lie detector test, they interview friends about you, check your credit, drug tests. I quit because I realized that I had stopped caring about my job performance, and nobody cared. Since then I work in the private sector. I get raises and promotions when I do a good job. I am appreciated. And a make a hell of a lot more money this way.
And the wonderful benefits? Not what they used to be, and the costs are not covered by the Govt. I get a better benefits package now.

7

Feds certainly do get fired. I’ve since leared that the guy had assaulted a supervisor.

8

I’m not a fed. I’m County.

9

So am I. One think I like is the sick leave. I currently have almost 700 hours banked. And last year I used a ton of it for a death and sickness in the family.

And I can use it for stuff like taking my mom to the doctor.

10

Do you get anything for it when you leave (resign, retire, laid off, whatever)? I have over 1100 sick pay hours and I’m retiring in 7 weeks (private sector). Don’t get anything for it, not even a pat on the back and a gold star for good attendance.

11

Do government jobs still hire and promote largely using written exams and depend less on typical job interviews, reference checks, etc.? The stereotype is that the rank and file Housing Inspector 1 worker bees are hitting the books every night to ace the Podunk Housing Inspection Assessment - Senior Level, Second Edition so they can grab that 10% raise and nicer office that comes more or less automatically with a score above 85%. For us in private industry, the question “How do I get promoted?” is not easy to answer well and the basic answer is, “We’ll tell you when and if we’re going to promote you, get back to work!”

12

raises hand
I have 25 days of paid leave (sick leave and vacation are not separated) per year. And my salary is twice what it was in the government sector.

That said, I pay more for lower-quality insurance and there’s no pension in private sector jobs.

But my private company gives us free coffee, sodas, water, and bagels. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m damned glad that I have a pension through my government job. That’s a *****huge *****benefit, given the number of times that 401K’s have bit the dust since I’ve been working.

The level of stupid is similar in private and public sector jobs as far as I can tell. Every organization has a huge block of stupid. I’m developing a theory that humans in groups are just stupid and inefficient. This is why “management theory” exists.

13

I think this depends on if a similar job actually exists in the private sector and if one could land such a job, too. How many jobs do not exist outside of government? I know one government employee with no education who has a job handling services for a client base that does not exist outside of government. I think she’s paid at least 3 times what she would make at any job I could see her handling in the private sector. I’ve also known at least one person who was waiting tables before getting hired for a government job, and didn’t really have any other prospects. It was almost like a struggling actor waiting tables hoping for a big break. Things may have changed a lot since these observations, but it seemed like there were a lot of govt jobs (on all levels) that had more general responsibilities and requirements than all but many of the lowest paid private sector gigs. And I’ve also seen quite a few more public jobs ads that basically say “qualifications: any degree” or experience in a very wide range of activities.

14

I work for the state and currently have somewhere around 1500 hours of sick leave accumulated. When we leave, we get paid for a quarter of it up to something over 1900 hours. So we could get paid for something over 475 hours when we leave. Plus any remaining annual leave. We can accumulate annual leave up to 320 hours. Anything over that we lose. Our annual leave is separate from sick leave.

robert_columbia, when I was hired I just had to fill out the state application and had a regular interview. As far as promotions, we have to fill out a form and get it approved by supervisors and department head and HR.

15

I work in a 9-1-1 center. There certainly are call centers in the private sector. But it’s not even close to the same thing. It would be like calling a bank manager a telephone operator because he uses the phone during the course of his work.

As a government worker outside the US, I am federal, state, and local jurisdictions all rolled into one. I direct deployment of everything from the animal control officer to warships at sea during a search and rescue operations. I am the first voice for emergency operations for an entire small country for most of my duty time.

The nature of the job is to wait for bad stuff to happen and deal with the reports made. On those occasion when nothing bad is happening, we wait. We don’t send people home early due to a lack of work now because we never know when there is going to be a shit-ton of work dropped in our laps when something really bad happens.

We staff for peak demand because no one wants to hear, “Thank you for calling 9-1-1. Your call is important to us. Please hold for the next available operator.” That means that, unless it is a really bad day, most of the time we are waiting, answering a few routine calls along the way.
The pay is ok, but what private sector job compares? The insurance is great, but the availability of health care leaves something to be desired. Pension is ostensibly good but there are lurking questions about maybe the government having borrowed from the pension fund!?

I can only carry forward up to 5 days of vacation. No carrying forward of sick leave, but generous short term disability benefits are available. Zero public holidays despite what the contract and law says. So no huge accumulation of leave allowed.

16

Meh. I had better bennies in the private sector (for one, the Feds offer exactly zero paid maternity leave.) My office also works much longer hours than we did in the private sector, though we do less after hours at home.

17

I don’t think so. But, if you have accumulated any more than 400, you get an extra day (or is it two) of vacation every year. Brings me up to 21-22 days of vacation, plus 11 holidays.

18

Hypno-Toad - I was saying that nobody gets fired. People can get laid off. The difference, to me, is cutting when funding gets extremely low, or a program is cancelled by politicians. In a fair majority of essential positions this doesn’t happen, of course.

Skywatcher - we get benefits, sure. The retirement can be nice, but you are going to need more retirement benefits as you aren’t making as much as the private sector to put into retirement percentage-wise. Health benefits are nice but all-too-often too blanketed. There is only one type of insurance where I work and you either have it or you don’t. I have to pay about $2000.00 a year for single coverage and I never use it because I’m a healthy young person.

The vacation and sick time are nice - but what good does a carryover do for me? I don’t want to take a huge vacation 10 years from now, I want to take a vacation while I’m young and can enjoy it. Sick time often has very strict regulations. I get two weeks vacation a year until the ten year mark. That means 96% of the working year I’ll be at work. And that is assuming I save none of my vacation.

mickymb is right on the nose about the pay-scale issue. I can work my balls off, or not, and still make the exact same at the end of the year. The ONLY thing that brings up my pay is being here. That gives disincentives to hard workers to stay in government. It also gives lazies an incentive to stay. Do you know what I learned my first year here? Pretend you’re busy. Because if you don’t your boss will give you more of their job and then take that as more free time for themselves.
And here is why no one is ever fired (if it can be helped): kickbacks.

If I do my job kind of shitty, at least I’m not doing nothing…or even worse; actively looking for a way to make one over on the employer.

If you fire me, then the boss chooses the next replacement. And who is to say that person isn’t worse?

Allowing frivolous firing gives managers the opportunity to install a kickback system. I’m the best candidate for the job, so it is hard to justify not hiring me. BUT, after I’m fired, and any other good candidates are in short order dismissed, the manager COULD hire a friend. Tell the friend to give you a small cut of their check, say 5% with the knowledge they wouldn’t have to do much of anything. They don’t have to work hard so they stick around, and by sticking around they get seniority raises. Install enough of your cronies and you are running the government, essentially, doing a terrible job of it, and getting paid well because you are all seniors.

19

Four of my immediate coworkers have been outright fired. Three all at once for computer shannigans (and before the economy tanked) and one for substance abuse problems.

20

I was a state employee before retiring. And I can confirm what others have said. The downside of public employment is you usually get paid less than you would in an equivalent job in the private sector. But you make up for this by generally getting better benefits than you’d get in the private sector. I think it’s an effect on the election process. Salaries come out of this year’s budget and legislators want to keep that low. So they agree to other items in exchange for salary increases because those items can be buried in future budgets.