Social Security has announced that its central offices in the Baltimore area will be operating on a normal schedule tomorrow.
Among other effects, the three days of closure due to the snowstorm have added to the backlog of people awaiting payment of disability benefits after a favorable decision and to the backlog of people awaiting action from the Appeals Council.
Even with the offices reopening, things will not be back to normal if schools remain closed. Employees can't leave their young children at home alone. Perhaps some locals can update us on the school situation.
9 comments:
DC schools just announced they will be open tomorrow, all surrounding counties in VA remain closed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/weather-closures-in-the-dc-area-for-monday-jan-25/2016/01/23/13cbf26c-c1ff-11e5-bcda-62a36b394160_story.html
Maryland counties mostly haven't announced yet, the ones that have are closed - http://essentials.baltimoresun.com/macro/school-closings/
Area schools around Woodlawn headquarters are closed. 29 inches of snow are simply going to take a couple more days to be cleared off. It's a mess here in the city, with minimal public transit in the first place and most of that not operating in the second place.
Really wish we had had another day. My part of Baltimore city remains a grim mess, and I hear it might be a skating rink out there tomorrow morning. Charles's clients could have waited another day.
Pretty amazing that employees were given the last couple of days off due to the weather considering how many have telework capability. Tell me again how telework makes the agency more efficient, when you make those that have laptops not work during inclement weather.
Bet McDonalds is open.
9:08, how is it that "Charles' clients" will be "back to normal" in one more day? Their hearings will take months to reschedule. To Charles' question, it appeared to me that school buses wouldn't make it through the streets, which were plowed, but only to one lane in places because there's nowhere to put the snow, which was in mechanical drifts of over 6'. Science fair project idea--improved (in function and cost) industrial snow melters.
It seems odd to me that once SSA reopened teleworking was not an option. Show up or take leave, those were the options. Many coworkers have children that were stuck at home due to school closings which caused them to take leave. If teleworking had been an option and they had taken their laptop home they could have resumed work and actually accomplished something.
Not sure how it works at HQ, but in my Midwestern hearing office, if the office is closed due to weather on a day you're scheduled to telework, you are expected to telework as usual (or take leave), and I have no problem with that. Now, people do need to realize you have to have your agency-issued laptop at home with you; you can't just work from any old computer. And, I believe for most employees, now that SSA has been rolling out its "single device" plan for some time, that laptop is also the computer they use when in the office (you dock it at your desk), so you tote the laptop back and forth between office and home. It certainly is possible, with a multi-day weather closing, that plenty of people were stuck at home on what would have been a telework day but their laptop remained stuck at the office.
There are union contracts to deal with and other issues. Not all components telework. Also, we've been told that the sds laptops are only to be taken home by employees authorized to telework. There is a lot more to it than just taking the laptop home and working.
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