“Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There’s never a letup, it’s relentless. Every day it piles up more and more, and you gotta get it out, but the more you get out, the more keeps coming in! And then THE BAR CODE READER BREAKS! AND THEN IT’S PUBLISHER’S CLERINGHOUSE DAY!”
I think the OP has created a bit of a strawman. Most people generally believe jobs in the private sector tend to pay better than government jobs. Although government workers are believed to have more benefits and holidays and it is much harder to get fired in government.
By it’s nature, government tends to be less efficient than the private sector (if one can believe it). Government institutions run on a fixed budget which can be greater or less than what they actually need to perform their role. They also have to provide a more or less equal service to a much larger customer base.
Private companies are driven by the need to be profitable. To spend less money than they earn. Salaries are typically more driven by market forces than by some arbitrary salary chart. They also don’t need to service every single person who wants to do business with them. Just the ones who can afford to.
Although I would challenge anyone to find a job more useless than the one I had several years ago working for a large insurance company. And a friend of mine who once worked for Bank of New York is fond of saying that the last thing (BNY founder) Alexander Hamilton told his staff was “I have to take care of this business with Burr. Nobody do anything until I get back.”
So bottom line, large organizations of any kind can become extremely inefficient and government agencies tend to be large.
Ask yourself, what would a clerk in a government office make. Then ask what would a clerk in private business make. A simple filing clerk is a minimum wage job. Just look at the temp agencies. It’s minimum wage no benefits.
Are federal/state file clerks making minimum wage and not getting benefits and never getting raises.
Government employees at the low levels make more than their counterparts in private industry.
I know quite a few Chicago city workers all are vastly overpaid, for the services they do. They work what would be minimum wage jobs in the private sector. Plus there are too many of them. I know office worker in Chicago city hall that don’t even fax because they have other people who’s sole job it is is to fax. Other just file, others just type. In a private sector one person would be doing all of that and more, for minimum wage and no benefits
Then you have the flip side. Government officials at the high end make much less. One could view Obama as CEO of the nation. If so, he is underpaid, by that standard.
I’m also a gov’t contractor. For an agency that’s VERY unpopular among conservatives, which makes me a very weird mixed-bag conservative, but that’s another story 
“My” agency, at least all of my clients appear to be damned hard workers. We often work side by side with them, and they are out there in the broiling sun right with us, granted, they’re not digging in the dirt with us, but their hours are often just as long. During “reporting” season, we flood them with various documents which they have to review and get back to us, they’re usually pretty responsive. In other words, they’re obviously producing, so I don’t see it where I am.
My mom retired from a city gov’t job several years ago, and in my home town of Anchorage, it was very common for the news to post city employees’ supposedly “outrageous” salaries. The thing is, their math was pretty damned fuzzy. They’d take all of their leave, medical coverage, retirement bennies and their salary, add them together and make it appear as if that were their annual pay.
My biggest complaint is the bad eggs, there seem to be an awful lot of them when you’re actually a “customer”.
This is no longer true. The private sector has salary pay bands exactly like the government salary system, and in my experience with a Fortune 15 company, you will stop getting annual increases if it puts you above the pay grade you are at determined by your position, regardless of how long you’ve been there or how hard you’ve worked.
If government workers aren’t over paid, why does privatization save so much money?
Talk to a person? Ha! I have been on the SS and Medicare phone systems over a half hour without getting to speak to a person. Whoever approved those systems are vastly overpaid.
And no one’s ever spent that long waiting for customer service at AT&T or their bank or mortgage company. :rolleyes:
First you need to demonstrate that privatization does in fact save so much money. Because I’m not at all convinced that’s the case.
It does, in the Orwellian Newspeak sort of way where “saves money” means “puts public money in private pockets”.
People seem to have beef with all government employees. From the feds to your local garbage men. We could all be getting paid minimum wage and it still would be too much for some people.
Last year the local fish wrap released a database to the public that revealed the salaries of state employees making $50,000 or more. This was in response to the revelation that some employees in some small town out west (sorry, can’t be arsed to google) were making ridiculous salaries. The journalist concluded, based on their research, that the state’s employees were being, if anything, underpaid compared to other states. This sums up the very last sentence in the article.
But you should have seen the hatred that the online commenters left behind. Pure, unadulterated hate. Reading that drek, you’d come away thinking that state employees were all billionaires or something. Yes, the director of my agency makes six figures…but why would this be a shock to anyone? He’s the boss of over 800 employees and answers directly to the state secretary of natural resources. Of course he deserves that salary. I don’t agree with every decision he’s made and he’s no genius, but he works hard. Everyone in the agency has respect for him in that regard.
What the database didn’t show were all the people who are NOT making $50,000. That is to say, the majority of us. But this didn’t seem to register with the boneheads that left negative comments. Jealousy, that’s all I can attribute it to. Perhaps they were all unemployed and making nasty comments was the only way they could lift their poor self-esteems. I have no idea.
I would be making more money if I were a federal employee, but does that make the feds overpaid? Well, no. Both me and my federal counterpart would probably make more money in the private sector. But we do have job security and better benefits. A coworker of mine who used to work in industry said she’d get laid-off every time they wrapped up a project. I don’t have to worry about that (we never seem to run out of projects!), and for this I am extremely grateful. However, we do brace ourselves whenever the political weather changes, because this can bring lay-offs. Or disastrous program shifts. We deal with this every four years, not including presidential elections (which can affect us as well). Private sector has to deal with market forces. Public sector has to deal with political forces. The “free market” may not be free or all that grand, but at least you can kind of predict what it’s going to do. Public opinion? Goobernatorial, General Assembly, and Attorney General dumbassery? Not as predictable.
It does, but I have the choice of which organization I want to deal with which curbs this. I have very little choice in what government I want to work with. The government knows this. Hence the shitty job they do.
Have you ever been to a post office? I’d go postal (LOL) if I had to work there, too.
I was interested in this, so did a little research.
Government filing clerk, starts at $28k, requires one year experience or two years of college.
Government filing clerk, starts at $22k, no experience requirements.
Government filing clerk, starts at $29k, one year of work or two years of college required.
Government filing clerk, starts at $18k, no experience required.
Compare that to:
Law firm filing clerk, up to $35k, no word on required experience.
Temp filing clerk, $24k a year, one year experience required.
Law firm filing clerk, $20-26k, no requirements listed.
Another filing clerk, $28-30k, 1-2 years of experience.
I’m not seeing a huge difference in this completely random survey of USAJobs and Monster. I’m not sure about the benefits packages offered by the private employers, but I think offering health insurance is the moral thing to do, so I’m not inclined to criticize the government for doing so. Also, the job listing don’t seem to indicate that filing clerks are minimum wage jobs.
Ah, the argument from anecdotal experience.
The great thing about this tactic is that, as long as i have an anecdote that’s different from yours, i have disproved your assertion, right? After all, if i’ve dealt with government employees, and have received friendly, courteous, and professional service from them, then that must cancel out your experience.
In the past few years, my wife and i have had occasion to deal with federal government employees in a few very specific ways, and in situations where the government often gets a lot of criticism.
The first was during the process of getting my green card, during which we had considerable contact with US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Yes, the forms themselves were quite complicated, and took lots of concentration and attention to detail to get right. Yes, it was expensive. But the whole process actually went much more quickly than i had anticipated, and at every stage of the process, whenever i came into contact with an employee, they were models of professionalism and friendly courtesy.
I made some initial inquiries over the phone, and the people i spoke to were great and answered all my questions. I had to go to a local office in order to have my biometrics (fingerprints, etc.) taken, and they were ready for me at the scheduled time of my appointment, and processed me quickly and efficiently. And a couple of months later, during our interview, my wife and i were treated with friendliness and professionalism by everyone involved, from the receptionist who received us in the waiting room to the official who conducted the interview.
Last year, i got an unexpected notice from the IRS saying that we owed them some money on our 2007 tax return. I had recently filed an amended tax return for 2007, and had expected to get a refund, so i was a bit puzzled. I called the number provided, and spent a good 15 to 20 minutes on the phone going over the case with an IRS representative. She was, from the moment she answered the phone, good humored and friendly, and she listened to my explanation and took pains to make sure that she understood my problem. She tracked down the problem, and while she could not fix it herself, she was very clear in telling what i would need to do in order to get it fixed, and she put a 4-month stay on my account so that i wouldn’t receive any more bills from the IRS while i got my situation sorted out.
My wife is currently on call for jury duty for the Southern District of California, which is federal jury duty. She got called in last week, and spent over half the day there, including a voir dire proceeding. She was not selected for a jury. She said that every single employee was friendly and helpful, that everyone called for jury duty was treated very well, and that the whole system seemed to be very well organized.
I should add, too, that i have had similarly positive experiences at the state level with the California DMV, in San Francisco (actually, Daly City) and in San Diego.
I recognize that i might have been lucky, and i’m not arguing that my positive experiences mean that no valid criticism can be made of federal employees. I also tend to agree with some people that, in some situations, it can be excessively difficult to fire public sector workers who don’t pull their weight. I’m just trying to point out how silly the anecdotal argument can be when describing something as huge as the United States government.
I’ve asked myself, but I told me I don’t know. Do you?
I think that it is the monopoly aspect of it as well. If someone at Target, for example, pisses me off, then I can always never do business with them again or complain to the manager who can correct the problem (and the manager cares because he wants to keep my business).
If someone at the DMV pisses me off, what am I going to do? Walk everywhere I go? I’ve seen it before: close a service window because it’s the clerk’s break time; no more special books at the library for an hour because it is “lunch time.”
A competitive private business would have a person who you could bitch at and would presumably care. Government employees don’t give a rat’s ass and I’m sure some will come on here and tell me that everyone needs a break and a lunch and completely miss the point.
I think the issue is that many of the activities of federal employees are doing things that don’t need to be done or we would be better off if they weren’t done at all.
If you look at the department of agriculture, they have grown, while the number of farmers has shrunk. We are now at the point were there are only 9 full time farmers for each department of agriculture employee. It might be a good question to ask if we still need a department of agriculture. Ditto for department of education and homeland security.
Considering that the USDA is responsible not only for actual farmers and farming, but also for the school lunch program, the food stamp program, and other programs related to food and nutrition, I’m not convinced that the USDA has outlived its usefulness.
I’ll agree with the bold. The rest of your words mean nothing to me. If you want me to write my experiences JUST at the DMV, and how not so stellar they were, I am sure I can out match all of your good experiences. So, do I win? :rolleyes:
No, his point is that your anecdotes are useless as far as determining the overall usefulness/ efficiency of government agencies because other people have anecdotes demonstrating the opposite. The plural of anecdotes is not ‘data’.