CAN'T THE FEDS LEARN FROM BUSINESS?

In the last year or so I suppose you've noticed the following scenario a few times.

XYZ Corp. has fallen upon bad times, so it jettisoned a large number of employees, and the survivors were rewarded by being given more work to do at the same pay.

Contrast this enterprise-saving strategy to those of federal agencies that lose money - that's all of them, isn't it? The postal service is legendary in this way, and it's response is to raise our rates and BOAST that no jobs are lost! "Lucky you, taxpayers; not ONE of our invaluable employees will lose his job, and your unwitting generosity will maintain all the featherbedding for which we are renown." One can check himself out of the grocery store and gas station, order his own tickets for theatres or airplanes, and buy everything under the sun, but it takes highly-paid, federal employees, some of them literate in English, to weigh letters that look fat and sell stamps!

Did I say "highly-paid?" Around 14% of federal workers earn more than $100k, and they're getting pay increases this year; did you? Did you notice that all billions and billions of jobs B.O. "created" were in government? Welfare burgeons on every front. The federal government hires HORDES of people that could not obtain ANY sort of competitive position. As alternatives to welfare checks they are given jobs without any expectation of performance attached. The menial office jobs that they could do, such as sweeping the floors, scrubbing the toilets, and emptying the wastebaskets, are invariably contracted out to aliens, possibly legal, from Central America. This is apparently so that our "working" welfare employees may retain their self-esteem. Notice that you are paying for these ardent feelings.

This largess is not confined to agencies like Housing, Education, and Welfare, where one would imagine that sterling qualifications are not required where the primary duty is to throw away other people's money. No, even the Department of Defense, when it comes to the non-technical, supporting kinds of personnel - clerical, mail room, e.g. - is just another welfare program, and those hired are useless. Some secretaries of this sort do NO secretarial work aside from sending memo's to remind the working staff of meetings, while highly-trained employees with advanced academic degrees must do their own photocopying, letter writing, and other duties usually ascribed to clerical staff. Even among applicants for tangible jobs, country of origin and race are more important to the feds than are employment credentials. Quality of workmanship is light years behind "diversity" on the list of attributes held vital in the federal employment arena. You ought to walk into a federal office and take a good look at just who is doing the work of YOUR government; this exercise will send you off writing letters to your representatives and senators.

It might be imagined, then, that after decades of such shoddy practice the degree of competence in a federal office would decline. True, and government's compensating strategy is to outsource more and more work to contractors, so that you get to pay twice for the work; once to the regular hires that should do it but are incapable, and again to some company that actually does it. Even there, though, the welfare culture the feds have bred all these years handicaps the efforts, for the ownership of a contracting firm strongly influences its chances of successful bidding; e.g. being minority-owned or female-owned is an immediate head start, and if the firms doesn't employ the quota of minority individuals the feds decree, well, don't bother bidding.

Why should a job with the federal government be a solid gold certificate to interminable, absolutely unimpeachable employment with raises independent of performance, for as long as the person survives? I can't think of any other place where this guarantee accompanies hiring; why can't these duds be laid off when the budget deficit is ominous?

Another feature of federal employment is the rather generous - with your dough, recall - system of annual vacation and sick leave, which are accrued every pay period. Some long-time employees (aren't they all, don't you suppose, with such sweetheart deals?) have so much sick leave they take days off whenever they please. In some places it's possible to "work" an extra hour each day and come in only 9 of the 10 days in a 2-week period. This is a terrific way to telescope every weekend into a 3-day break, and if you can find half the staff present on a Monday or a Friday, I'll give you a dollar or a doughnut, which, with B.O. inflation, have about equal value. Supervisors don't even THINK of scheduling meetings for their entire offices on Fridays or Mondays. Even without that particular employment plan, if you walk into a fed office and don't find at least one of the sweaty laborers out "ill" or vacationing somewhere, I make you the same offer.

What do you think of this cursory education? It's your money that supports this nonsense, so why not demand an across the board 5% cut in the federal workforce? There would still be more waste there than you will EVER see in your own workplace, and what are we getting from this army of welfare recipients? Look around at government and answer the question.