Some excerpts from the minutes of a January 17, 2008 conference call of the Executive Committee of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations (NCSSMA), an organization of Social Security management personnel:
The state of field offices was a hot topic of discussion. Conference call participants weighed in with comments about the impact our resource shortage is having on the Field Offices and the Teleservice Centers [TSC]. Field/TSC employee morale is at an all time low and the number of employees retiring is growing. Employees do not feel supported by the agency, and so are more prone to retire as soon as they can. Many have over 30 years of service but are at the end of their ropes because there is no hope in sight. ... Some of the regions expressed the concern that new hires seem to be targeted for urban offices with little done for suburban or rural offices. New managers are overwhelmed with the decreased staff and increased workloads. Managers are increasingly involved in processing direct service workloads and tabling traditional management activities as they have no other way to provide the public service. Rising expectations from area, regional and national components to clear work are unrelenting, with new reports, listings and additional workloads being piled on field office employees. The pain needs to be felt by other components including ADO [Area Director's Offices] and regional employees. There is a sense of doom – Field Offices are being left to wither without any assistance. ... With the usual dedication, employees have been very creative in their approaches to handling staffing losses with all pitching in across the board and doing the best they can. Maybe it is time that we quit trying to prove that we can do the same amount of work, or even more, with fewer resources. The despondency and anxiety in the field and TSCs continue to grow, but our staffing losses do not seem to concern Central Office.
And just today, the AFGE has released a draft of the MOU regarding early out retirement as "part of the Agency's overall staffing strategy to manage the retirement wave". There are varying separation dates for different components, but all are either during August 2008 or no later than September 1. And I am seriously considering it as I have 21 years of service and will be 54 years old. Our highest staffing was about 45, and we are down to 39 with three retirements planned for this year alone, maybe 4 with mine.
ReplyDeleteSure they can hire two service reps for the price of my salary, but those two people cannot do any of the work I do as an SSI specialist, except, perhaps, calling numbers in the waiting room and setting them up to talk to someone else.
If I do retire, I will have a clean desk when I walk out the door, and all the old stuff that I have put off will be finished. Maybe not the new stuff, but the old stuff will have resolution of some kind.
The office I worked in when I retired went from a high of 42 down to 20 employees despite ever increasing workloads! At least 26 people retired from the office since the fall of 1995 and it looks like at least three of those remaining plan to take early out this year because the stress is overwhelming.
ReplyDeleteMy office has gone from 32 to 10 with one more leaving shortly. All the desks are piled with work that will never be cleared--it will just be shuffled to whoever is left until the office is inevitably closed, then it will be shipped to whatever understaffed office takes over our workload.
ReplyDelete