I have worked for a municipality and I can’t figure out what positions you are talking about. The “clerks”, if by that you mean people that directly interact in person with the public, are generally people that have other roles than just being clerks. None of them were slow or inept from what I could tell, and weren’t any ruder to the public than they were to the people they worked with. I mean, there were curmudgeons and hags that generally had a bad attitude, but I find that in the private sector too. They are just not the nicest people to anyone, not just the customers. I think the difference is that when we go to the town hall, for example, we have more of a sense of entitlement regarding the service, and that’s why these bad apples stand out to you.
In short: It’s difficult to fire government employees for not doing their job correctly because of other government employees not doing their job correctly.
To can someone, there really does need to be a paper trail documenting the person’s insufficient performance. I recall a case where the employee lasted almost 12 years without a negative review because a series of supervisors never documented the atrocious–and I mean incredibly atrocious–performance. When the government office concerned finally got a good supervisor, who documented correctly, it took about a year to “overcome” the previous evaluations and the poor performer was canned. If the previous supervisors had done their job properly, that employee would’ve been canned long before.
I’ve worked in both public and private sector jobs, and have seen lazy, goldbricking employees in both. In the private sector, the lazy ones usually are related to, or are friends of, the owners or managers, and they’re often quickly promoted to management like in the movie Office Space. You don’t get promoted to pharoa by working hard on the pyramid.
I’m a US government employee. I’m a supervisor. First, the OP is correct. Last time I saw statistics firing for cause was significantly lower in the government than it was in private industry. The problems are several. First, typically after a year, most GS employees have tenure. Second, believe it or not, many government employees I’ve known at the higher levels are fully employed with their “normal” duties and don’t have time for supervisory duties like documenting poor behavior, spending time on mid-term feedback, writing meaningful evaluations, etc. All of which are essential for removing a tenured employee. I’m retired military so I know I owe it to my people to give them that feedback, but I work considerably longer than most of my other supervisory colleagues. Finally, in my experience, the government–at least the federal government, advertises the grievance process a lot more than most civilian contractors and makes it easier to grieve. We have a guy in our office who has only been in the government for two years and has already filed two lawsuits on two separate occasions for two separate personnel reasons. Most people don’t have time to deal with that stuff and its easier to hand that person off-often via promotion so there is no grievance, to someone else.
It is hard to fire someone because there are many procedures and a complex overall process. The well known “red tape” of government.
Most of that (and most of the government “red tape”) can be traced back to past abuses.
Any abuse that becomes known leads to more red tape to prevent that abuse in the future, whether or not the benefits out-weigh the costs or the new procedure really makes sense. Someone, sometime got fired for an improper reason, so they add a new procedure/documentation to prevent someone from being fired for that reason, then someone else gets fired for some other improper reason, so even more appeals/reviews/documentation/etc. are added to make sure it doesn’t happen again. On and on, narrowing the band of those who actually get through and do get properly fired.
This is a good point. My wife’s principle directly supervises over 170 people along with dealing with students, parents, gov requirements for the program. She can only take the time to deal with the extreme standouts one or two at a time. And she also needs the backing of her director.
I had some dealings with the FDA where we were asking them how to go about complying with their rules. When we got hold of the helpful people, their answer to each and every question began with, “we can neither prescribe nor recommend…”. Basically, they were sorta telling us, “we can’t tell you what to do, we can only tell you that you’re doing it wrong”. :smack:
I guess that their own hands were probably tied (by yet more Byzantine regulations), but very frustrating, nonetheless.
Actually, in fact they were rather helpful, once you overlooked the oft repeated annoying disclaimer.
Whatever your personal experience may be, and I am not doubting it, the inability to fire underperforming employees is far down on the list of why the Postal Service is shown to be in the red. Much greater are various forms of political interference such as mandatory health care setasides that are many decades longer than what private industry does (most likely instituted by congressional opponents of the post office intended to make the post office look bad by showing large amounts of fake deficit,) and the inability to consolidate or close redundant or expensive locations. (The move to email does not help, but is somewhat countered by the move to online shopping, so in my opinion falls below political interference for reasons for the post office showing a deficit.)
While both of these could in theory be points against the post office system per se, it certainly doesn’t point to underperformance of employees as a cause of the post office’s troubles.
And at any rate, some of the other package delivery companies have unions of their own. (Some may not.) And you could just look at the board for customer service stories for most of the Postal Service’s competitors. In fact, I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a thread here where a post office employee simply leaves a “you weren’t here” sticker on the door without bothering to knock.
I would REALLY love to exist in the alternate universe inhabited by Doubled. In my experience, when a worker at the DMV, USPS, or IRS reached what is best described as surly, by comparison to the others they are remembered as beacons of light in the darkness. The first two categories uniformly exude the feeling that they get paid the same whether they actually do the work or not. The first stage IRS employees are clearly hired to be dumb. They are to speak their written lines, and never really try to help or understand. Higher up the IRS food chain are some remarkable intelligent and helpful people.
It seems like BrainGlutton missed my supporting posts four years ago. Hopefully he’ll see them this time through and understand his skepticism was misplaced.
This is very interesting. Our state is looking to get rid of “tenure” (technically called Career Status here in North Carolina), and our state’s NEA affiliate has filed suit, claiming that this elimination of career status violates due process rights of teachers.
Much as I think the loss of career status is yet another slap in the face by a legislature fundamentally hostile to public education, the lawsuit seemed bogus to me. But from what you’re saying, maybe it’s not. Do you have any thoughts on the subject?
Almost exactly the same thing happened in private industry in a case I know of. When we did get it together to fire this person, we discovered that his former supervisor threw out all the documentation (the former supervisor was going bonkers.) Maybe in Mickey Ds people get tossed at a moment’s notice, but large companies have very strict procedures to follow for firing for cause - except for extreme cases like drugs or violence.
Massive layoffs are another thing. There have been massive layoffs in the public sector, and I seem to have missed the massive lawsuits.
Big management changes are relatively rare in the private sector as compared to the public sector, and the new management does not have a batch of cronies to reward with lower level jobs.
Also, when private management cares a little about getting rid of too many people unless they are planning to spin off a company. Legislators and governors can cut budgets, make the taxpayers happy. and then blame lazy government workers for lack of service.
I know this is from four years ago, but today if letting someone go increases profit the big guys get the profit and the low level manager who has to do it gets the heat.
5TH, review Garrity v. New Jersey, citing the famous words with a legal twist “Between a rock and a Whilpool”.
Review this, link, also citing, Rankin v. Mcpherson.
…The Supreme Court established the conditions under which a public employee may be fired because of political affiliation in a trilogy of cases: Elrod v. Burns 1976), Branti v. Finkel (1980) and Rutan v. Republican Party (1990). As determined in these cases, public employees may not be fired because of their political affiliation unless “party affiliation is an appropriate requirement for the effective performance of the public office involved.”
I work for a state, and when I went through management training the HR disciplinary unit came by and talked about what they do. Most notably, they described their role as not trying to get employees fired, but trying to make them better workers.
Dude, if I know you’re not going to let me go because I’m an incompetent ass, why would I try to be a better worker? I’m better off doing a half-assed job for 20 years, playing your little game, and retiring with a pension. And that’s just what people do.