A press release from Social Security:
I really want better service at the field offices but I strongly doubt that keeping field offices open on Wednesday afternoons will achieve that goal. I suspect it will have the opposite effect. This is the sort of thing that comes out of the assumption that federal employees are lazy.
Adding an additional 1,100 employees to front line positions is great but funding is going down, not up, so the question has to be "What other jobs will be cut?" He doesn't answer that question. Hearings operations is the obvious answer but who knows?
By the way, "successful business career"? I'm not sure what he's done that's so successful other than being born extremely wealthy and not completely screwing up his inheritance.
“Thank you for your interest in the Social Security Administration and for reading this Open Letter to the Public to learn more about what we are doing to improve service.
A Little about Me:
I have been frequently asked why, at age 73 with a loving wife of 51 years, a beautiful family, and a successful business career, I would want to take on the responsibility and stress of running a huge government organization that affects nearly every American. My answer is simple. I took the job as Commissioner of Social Security because I saw that this very important agency faced an increasing number of challenges. Millions of Americans depend on SSA to do our job well, each day, no excuses—because when we don’t, people suffer. I took the job because SSA must dramatically improve customer service for you, your loved ones, and everyone who depends on our programs.
What is My Plan?
When I speak to groups of SSA employees, to my senior managers, and to external groups including Congress, they ask what I plan to accomplish. It is no secret that the government is full of bureaucratic processes. There are Agency Strategic Plans, Annual Performance Plans, Budget documents for this and future years, IT strategic plans, and any number of internal organization planning documents. I understand that these writings serve to provide direction and transparency, but I doubt most employees or members of the public read them. I am hopeful that this letter will answer your questions in a straightforward and easy to follow way.
My plan is rooted in common sense. SSA has many departments and over 60,000 employees who perform millions of functions each year. But, whether it is issuing retirement checks, processing disability claims, or providing Social Security cards, our fundamental mission is to ensure timely and accurate service for the public. My plan is to emphasize and restore fundamental public service so that when you call us, we answer timely. When you come to our offices, we serve you timely. When you apply for benefits, you receive a timely answer from us and, if you are approved for benefits, you receive a timely check from us. Some SSA employees and the three unions who represent them may suggest we simply want to push employees even harder. I’ve run enough businesses and organizations to know that no employer gets 100% from every employee every day—there is always room to improve. Over the past 5 months, I have met with and observed many, many SSA employees. Let me tell you what I determined: they care. They are just as concerned and stressed about work piling up as I am. They dread the feeling of coming into work knowing the public will line up and wait far too long for correct answers. That is demoralizing. I don’t want our excellent employees to feel beaten down or think that headquarters fails to appreciate their challenges. By getting wait times down, we allow our employees to do their work in a better environment where they can focus on the action in front of them not the piles of work around them.
As important as it is to serve you timely, we need to serve you well. We need to evaluate how we train our employees, review their work and give feedback, and appropriately simplify our policies to be easier to implement and understand. I have reviewed audits and noted that we consistently receive poor marks in certain areas. You should expect that we will properly pay benefits to only the folks who are entitled to them and we should always pay them the correct amount. That is important not only for stewardship but also to each of you who receives a check from us. I also cannot ignore the message from significant workloads like litigation, which can occur when we do not properly apply policy. Yes, we must address the affected cases but we must also fix the root cause. Getting things wrong has been very costly to us. It is time to invest in ensuring we get things right.
Part of the answer is technology. However, before we can readily implement more efficient systems, we have to fix some core issues. Did you know we store a beneficiary’s address in something close to 20 different systems? If you move, we can change your address in one place but that may not change it in the others. We are working to fix this and other problems. Our new approach will not look at our services from our vantage point, such as using a specific system to complete a singular action we are working on in the moment. We will look at our work from your perspective. Meaning, if you go online and then call us and then come in to an SSA office, our employees will know that history and you don’t have to start from square one each time.
However, technology alone is not the solution. Sure, many people like the idea of going online for convenient service and we need to modernize and meet that need. But, many other people need a little extra help, a little more information, maybe even some reassurance from an expert. Thus, we need a responsive workforce. We already have people who care deeply about our mission and the public. Now we need to have enough folks to meet the demand so that they can spend the time they need to handle each customer’s need correctly. We need to implement additional quality checks so that we can let our employees know when they misapplied a policy or missed a key issue. Our employees want this feedback. We need to give our employees what they need to get you the right result.
We need to assess how we do our work, how we use technology, and how we empower our employees at SSA. All of those things are complicated, but they are necessary to accomplish my plan for SSA. What is the plan? We are going to work every day to improve the public service you receive from us. As I said, common sense.
What happens next?
Right now, SSA’s Office of Systems is working with public and private sector experts to modernize our technology infrastructure so that we can serve you more efficiently and with greater accuracy. At the same time, we are shifting resources to the front lines of our public service operation. Our Office of Operations manages nearly all of our public facing services like the field offices in your communities and the National 800 Number. It is logical and appropriate that we focus on these offices first. Some people may believe that is a “hiring freeze” but I call it “smart hiring”—sending our resources to the front lines where you benefit most. Dependent on our final appropriation for fiscal year 2020, we are targeting additional hiring in these public service offices, and I have already directed that SSA hire 1,100 more people to do this work. During a time of more constrained resources, the agency closed field offices early on Wednesdays. We are ending that practice to provide you with additional access to our services. We are also ending a telework pilot, which was implemented without necessary controls or data collection to evaluate effectiveness or impact on public service. I support work-life balance for SSA employees consistent with meeting our first obligation: to serve the public. A time of workload crisis is not the time to experiment with working at home, especially for the more than 40,000 employees who staff our public facing offices.
Modernizing technology and getting more employees back into the offices are critical first steps. We will take additional steps to chip away at our current wait times; however, the first obvious move is an infusion of resources into key offices, increasing the availability of those offices to the public, and holding all of our employees accountable. We know how important our work is and understand the consequences of poor service.
You will hear from me again with straightforward information about our progress. I appreciate your patience as we work to improve our performance in service to you.”Am I wrong to think that this shows that Saul shares the standard right wing assumption that poor service at federal agencies is due to lazy federal employees? That's so naive.
I really want better service at the field offices but I strongly doubt that keeping field offices open on Wednesday afternoons will achieve that goal. I suspect it will have the opposite effect. This is the sort of thing that comes out of the assumption that federal employees are lazy.
Adding an additional 1,100 employees to front line positions is great but funding is going down, not up, so the question has to be "What other jobs will be cut?" He doesn't answer that question. Hearings operations is the obvious answer but who knows?
By the way, "successful business career"? I'm not sure what he's done that's so successful other than being born extremely wealthy and not completely screwing up his inheritance.
35 comments:
Why do you go with the standard left wing assumption that the fix to every problem is more money. I see nothing in Mr. Sauls' comments to indicate that he thinks the problem is "lazy employees." That is just a reflection of your own bias against this administration. I found some of his comments to be very welcome and show that he has been talking to staff and has learned what some of the basic problems are: "Did you know we store a beneficiary’s address in something close to 20 different systems? If you move, we can change your address in one place but that may not change it in the others." I heard this recently from an SSA employee. Apparently, he has been talking to and listening to the employees. Modernizing IT is right where the focus should be. I also wholeheartedly agree with keeping the offices open on Wednesdays. It is frustrating when you try to call about something that you really need to know only to find out the office is closed. Some of us have busy schedules also. I really doubt closing for an afternoon has helped them catch up on their workload. Those calls that they are not answering are simply deferred for another day. It really doesn't make much sense if you think about. Also wholeheartedly agree with the comments re telework when the agency can't keep up with its workload. To find something disagreeable in these comments you have to really fall back on your biases. This all makes good sense and seems to me Mr. Saul has the right direction in mind. Of course changing the course of any large government bureaucracy is probably impossible. But, shouldn't we at least give the guy a chance before predicting gloom and doom. Unfortunately, due to the mass hysteria regarding this administration that has consumed about 1/2 the country, many are hoping, actually rooting for, failure so their hysteria can be vindicated. Everything Mr. Saul hopes for in these comments are good things. So, why do you want him to fail?
Employees at SSA have been battered and scapegoated by this administration and this will not improve service. Wednesdays were used for trainings and meetings, any morale activities stopped long ago. All employees from local management on down have been filling in for ridiculously understaffed field offices doing the service representative job and trying to fit in our regular duties in the mornings. Telework was essential for so many employees with hours-long commutes and employees who never get time at their desk to process any work. Yes there are under performers- but time is needed to train and monitor these employees- time no one has because everyone is at the front helping the lobby. Many were never service representatives and now find themselves spending 50-60% of their time doing this job, on top of the 100% of the job they were actually hired to do. Training is inadequate- and the modernization has thus far doubled the time it takes to process a claim, and created more systems problems. This "open letter to the public" just put the cherry on top of the negative outlook for SSA employees. This last week has been the most demorializing in my entire career and I can guarantee this will cause more people to find other jobs and retire in droves. I know I'm looking.
The FO staff loved closing early on Wednesdays (although management would sometimes use those times for training or meetings) and most of them loved telework. Some employees were more productive when teleworking. Can't say everyone was. Bet the staff is not too happy.
And I agree 5:16; didn't get any inference that he thought the employees were lazy.
I have to that in spite of my totally liberal leanings, and Charles I am pretty sure you can figure out who I am, I have to say I thought Saul's missive was on point and had some good ideas. Let's give him a chance and see what happens.
"Some SSA employees and the three unions who represent them may suggest we simply want to push employees even harder. I’ve run enough businesses and organizations to know that no employer gets 100% from every employee every day—there is always room to improve. "
Wow. Where to begin. If he actually understood how staff has been working hard with less I find it hard to believe he'd phrase things this way. Because this does come across not as recognizing how hard they have been working, just that they could work harder. And that he expects that extra effort. But he's 71 and has long not been on the employee side of the work equation, so I guess that isn't a surprise.
And I find the absence of discussion on management in all this interesting as well.
"I support work-life balance for SSA employees consistent with meeting our first obligation: to serve the public." Yeah, see above.
Hey, it's too soon to know how all this will end, but clearly he's got an idea on public service that will need resources to make actual change.
If you'd seen the entirely unnecessarily aggressive email he sent to ALJs "reminding" them to take ethics training - threatening judges who are not even close to the deadline for taking the training - you would know we are dealing with someone with a deep-seated hostility toward the people he is supposed to be leading.
"So, why do you want him to fail?"
Complete strawman that you invented; never in his statement does Mr. Hall state that he doesn't want Commissioner Saul to succeed.
He states (quite rightly) that if Saul is to succeed, it's exceedingly dumb to start by calling out his own subordinates to the public as lazy and selfish.
Calling out SSA's IT is the free space in bingo. There's not a single employee in SSA that is ok with our IT situation. I know you seem very impressed by it as a sign of his perceptiveness, but I guarantee it was one of the very first things he was briefed on when taking the job. It's not a sign that he's engaged with his employees. It just shows he's alive, upright, and capable of object permanence.
Telework and Wednesday afternoon desk days were intended to INCREASE productivity, not as gifts to employees in place of productivity. Both sides can claim their success or failure using their own pet metrics, but it's undeniably a sign of poor leadership that the first public statement about them blames employees for being spoiled and selfish.
As for his claims that these measures were necessary when staffing was short but that has been resolved, I'd laugh. I haven't seen any magic wave of hires. We're still just on the side of short-staffed in our office. I know plenty out there are doing much worse.
And lastly, who starts a public message like this with I, and me, and my? His ego shines through it all.
This is definitely one big middle finger to central office. It's an interesting strategy. Let's see how it works out for him
@5:16;
Commissioner Saul’s remarks come across as standard boiler plate BS I heard so many times during my long career at SSA. I did not see any real substantive evidence this guy has any real sense how to run SSA. Sure, IT Systems upgrades are necessary, but that is always true. Technology changes rapidly, and everyone in public and private sectors constantly grapples with this issue.
Perhaps if competent SSA management dating back to the roll out of HPI in 2001 had actually hired people with some IT education and experience, rather than promoting employees and favorites from Operations and Clerk positions who had no knowledge of IT whatsoever, SSA would be in much better shape in terms of efficiency of service to the public. But, SSA did NOT do this. Instead, they put unqualified individuals, several from Operations, into newly created, high paying jobs, particularly in all levels of management, in the Hearings components of SSA. These people had no legal background, and were clueless how to run the Hearings components staffed largely with ALJ’s and Attorneys, who all have advanced professional degrees, and many also have long, distinguished legal careers and experience.
So, the Hearings components were largely managed by unqualified, non-Attorney’s, many without more than a high school education, managing those with advanced professional degrees and legal careers. The ONLY form of managing and supervising employees these individuals understand is old school, top down, chain of command, rigid, doctrinaire personnel policies. This did nothing for employee morale in the Hearings components, or anywhere else for that matter, because such forms of management are retrograde, antiquated, and inconsistent with rapidly changing technology in the 21st century. Before this ill thought out, inept nightmare of HPI rolled out, the Hearings components of SSA were managed and run by Attorneys and legal professionals. Employee morale was much greater, and work environments were more collegiate. HPI removed all these competent professionals and replaced them with unqualified, bumbling managers and supervisors at all levels. Of course, this was a disaster, and the ineptness and inefficiency from these poor decisions has everything to do with why SSA is where it is today, especially with the Hearings components, but really, across the board, in the Field offices, as well. Archaic, rigid, doctrinaire, punitive forms of managing and supervising are ineffective and unacceptable in the 21st century.
Quite simply, removing telework across the board in Operations, or in any other components of SSA, is NOT an answer or solution, to public service or efficiency. Telework has NEVER been the problem. However, I will submit to you some jobs simply are not suitable for telework while many others are. For example, allowing IT Systems folks and Group Supervisors at OHO telework from home makes no sense. It is pertinent that IT Systems employees be readily accessible in the office to respond to the massive computer issues that occur daily.
The entire position of Group Supervisor and the ridiculous number of them in each OHO office MUST be replaced with one very competent Supervisory Attorney. When HPI rolled out in 2001, many Supervisory Attorneys who were highly skilled and possessed a great deal of Agency specific expertise were illegally forced out and replaced with numerous, unqualified, non-Attorneys and inexperienced Attorneys with little Agency experience. Who in their right mind ever thought this was a good idea, and what in Gods name are they doing when they telework? Most are incapable of writing legally defensible decisions, but somehow they possess the education, experience, and knowledge to evaluate the writing and performance of licensed Attorneys and Senior Attorneys, as well as ALJ’s?
What is needed is tweaking with a scalpel, and not ill conceived massive across the board acts that serve no useful purpose.
Best move I have made in my life was leaving the DO as a CR. Miss the money and cheap benefits, but I dont use as much of the benefits now that I am out of there and healthy.
The IT modernization plan has been an absolute cluster F for at least the last ten years and resulted in millions of lost dollars. Removing telework and reopening Wednesdays (possibly the most productive backend day), is going to result in gigantic backlogs. Congratulations on beating everyone down your first few weeks in charge, SIR!
Gee wiz, for every 5 days of work SSA teleworkers were missing from the office 3 of those days. I employ remote employees. If they are good, they knock it out of the ball park, but if they are not, the employer is wasting their money. Those who are disciplined to work will teleworker, those who are not do other things during their assigned work hours. If you open on Wednesdays, and bring into the office all the workers who are assigned there, and hire 1100 more front line workers, it will make a big difference.
" don’t want our excellent employees to feel beaten down or think that headquarters failsto appreciate their challenges. By getting wait times down, we allow our employees to do their work in a better environment where they can focus on the action in front of them not the piles of work around them. "
I wish he knew how tone deaf this sounds. We have a smaller office of 28 employees who see on average 250-300 individuals a day. We are constantly fighting to see every single person. To reduce wait times below 30 minutes, we require the entire staff be sitting in the reception window, not processing claims or finishing backend work. When we focus on the attention in front of us, the back end will grow.
The Wednesday early close was to allow CR's/SR's to work on cases pending (helped some, but didn't help enough in my experience; too much was still routinely "dumped" over to the PC, who are also woefully understaffed). Saul is implying that some [or many] employees abuse Telework. Seems it happens from some; depends on the work being done. Scheduling interviews while they telework (I managed to front end trying to connect people that were in office to EE's that had gone TW) is inefficient. Instead, mgmt. should have more flexibility to suspend TW for an employee that seems to abuse it. Not having to commute for some days is a huge "hidden" benefit for employees, and I suspect removing it will lead to overall morale loss. Another morale loss for those EEs already giving 110% was Saul effectively implying that they aren't giving enough effort.
anon@9:34AM,
The gigantic backlogs are already here and have been for ages. That couple of hours on Wednesday is meaningless to the shear scope of what is piled up, and I'm plainly shocked that it lasted as long as it did. Telework contributes nothing to or from that backlog -- if an employee is on the job, they should be working and telework is at best no more productive than being in the office. Probably less so, given that you can't print anything and there are some things you can't do when teleworking while in the office.
What is really scary is that these backlogs are occurring and persisting during a period of relatively low claims activity. When the next economic downturn comes and people start to get laid off, claims will absolutely skyrocket and the backlogs will balloon to astronomical levels. At that point, SSA will replace IRS as the government agency that can't do anything right..
Concerning that little "Did you know we store a beneficiary’s address in something close to 20 different systems?" anecdote.
This little tale actually was an example previously used by Michael Astrue during his tenure and was simply recycled by whoever typed that statement up for Saul. It thus demonstrates nothing concerning Saul's supposed knowledge about IT. At age 71, he likely knows very little and simply depends upon whatever smoke SSA's IT head blows up his rear orifice. In other words, exactly the same as most commissioners have done over the last 30 years.
That the address thing is still quotable is, of course, extremely telling about the effectiveness of SSA IT even after all these years...
5:16 - Welcome to the blog, Mr. Saul. We don't want you to fail, but like all good managers you've quickly demonstrated the propensity to blame rank-and-file workers for any failures.
SSA has witnessed years of inept managers that couldn't plan for the next hour, much less for the ebbs and flows of economic cycles. IT is a mess, staffing levels are inadequate, morale is akin to a prison chain gang. What's the first step in solving these nagging issues? Perhaps fire the inept execs in Baltimore and Falls Church whose inactions led to the problems Mr. Saul is so courageously seeking to address? Nope. Much simpler to blame the line employees who must not be giving 100% every day. "There is always room to improve!" (Except for management, which is holy and perfect in every way.)
Saul's tired memo is scribbled directly from the Republican playbook of bravely heaping blame on public sector employees. Over the past 10 years or so, the politicians have blamed the recession on government employees (and teachers' unions!); frozen wage increases for years in the midst of a booming economy; decreased benefits for new employees; froze new hiring and increased productivity goals to offset attrition; and waged all-out war on public sector unions. Wait, you say that government employees still manage to find a bit of joy in their lives from teleworking one day a week and not dealing with traffic and parking?? Well, Mr. Saul (a self-professed successful businessman who single-handedly managed to inherit businesses and great wealth from his father) can fix that!
So thank you, Mr. Saul for your efforts in "holding all of our employees accountable" (except for managers). I eagerly await the next steps in your common-sense approach to improving public service, which I'm sure will involve chaining people to their desks, perhaps creating a centralized gulag, or something equally visionary.
The worst commissioner SSA has had in my 40 years at the agency. Other federal agencies which have decided to cut back telework let the employees at least keep one day per week. They knew how essential it was to employee well being, work life, and morale. SSA is the only agency to completely stop it. Giving telework to us and then completely stopping in this manner, is just devastating for employee morale at SSA.
The worst SSA commissioner we've had in my 40 years at the agency. Other agencies which cut back on telework, had the good sense to at least let employees keep 1 day per week. They knew how important it was for employees work-life, and they also knew that completely taking it away would be devastating for employee morale.
It will take years for employee morale to recover from this. And, Mr. Saul, telework is not an "experiment" it has been at SSA for years, it is a vital part of employee's lives, and it is being used government wide. Telework is the way of the future but you seem to want to return to the 1980's.
So Saul's idea for modernizing the SSA workforce is to take away telework? What were the other ideas for ushering SSA into the 21st century? Typewriters? Carrier pigeons?
Spoken like a genuine, inept, incompetent SSA Manager/Supervisor more than likely hired as a Re-employed Annuitant under false . pretenses you are, “Desperately needed,” and being paid full Annuity and full salary. Regardless of who you are, your antiquated, outmoded, rigid conception of how to manage and run an effective workforce in the 21st century is wrongheaded. It is you, and others like you, who are a huge problem and must go immediately for SSA to run in a highly efficient manner with a workforce where morale is once again high, and employees are proud of their jobs and what they do.
Aye Gawd- what's this guy going to do next? Take away OHO's hour long lunches!? Perish the thought!
An open letter back to Commissioner Saul (1/2)
> our fundamental mission is to ensure timely and accurate service for the public.
The fundamental mission of the SSA is to effectively administer the nation’s social security programs, which provide retirement security and disability insurance to many millions of Americans. This administration entails far more than timely and accurate customer service. SSA is accountable for properly and accurately disbursing over $1 trillion each year to beneficiaries and recipients who are entitled under the Social Security Act to receive payments under the OASI, SSDI, and SSI programs; for administering and – together with your fellow trustees – stewarding, nearly $3 trillion of funding reserved in trust for current and future generations of Social Security beneficiaries; and for managing the operations of a large Federal agency that bears responsibility, in turn, for effectively administering several complex social insurance programs that support some of the most vulnerable Americans.
SSA’s customer service mission is shared with the many other components like policy and stewardship that are and have always been crucial to the administration of a major social insurance program, even if they are ordinarily invisible.
> I don’t want our excellent employees to feel beaten down or think that headquarters fails to appreciate their challenges.
The employees at headquarters, like their colleagues on the front lines, are presumably performing the functions that they have been hired for, in support of the missions that you, your predecessors, and Congress have deemed to be in the public interest. Should your statement be taken to mean that there are no "excellent employees" at headquarters, or that they too are not feeling "beaten down" after years of resource cuts, attrition, increasing demands, and temporary leadership?
> You should expect that we will properly pay benefits to only the folks who are entitled to them and we should always pay them the correct amount.
Statements elsewhere in the letter indicate that customer service, not stewardship, is the agency’s fundamental mission. Further, under your leadership, the agency offices that help ensure program integrity have been subject to a longstanding hiring freeze because they do not directly support front-line operations. Your letter indicates only a plan for improving customer service; what is your plan to effectively protect SSA programs against fraudulent, improper, and incorrect payments, and to resource this crucial function?
> It is logical and appropriate that we focus on [public-facing] offices first. Some people may believe that is a "hiring freeze" but I call it "smart hiring"
You have sought to transform inefficient business processes, empower the public through new self-service tools, and use data effectively to drive business improvement. Yet, the central office workforce that bears the weight of these initiatives – ones that directly drive SSA’s customer service priorities – has been subject to a longstanding hiring freeze that you imposed in order to hire front-line personnel. Your immediate office is placing extraordinary pressure on the remaining central office staff to deliver technical solutions in a timeframe that is wholly incommensurate with the resources provided to do so properly. Sending resources only to the front lines to be trained on obsolete tools is hardly “logical and appropriate”. "Smart hiring" would also bring on specialized personnel to bring these ambitious technology plans into fruition and support a leaner, more effective, and more empowered frontline staff that is equipped with the tools, training, and information needed to more effectively and efficiently serve the public.
…
...(2/2)
>I support work-life balance for SSA employees consistent with meeting our first obligation: to serve the public.
The letter suggests neither a nexus between telework and impaired public service, nor that the presence of telework impaired the public’s access to SSA services, particularly for employees in the Office of Operations who do not directly interact with the public but were nonetheless ensnared in termination of the telework pilot. What evidence exists that there is a quantifiable adverse effect of telework on SSA’s public service mission?
> I appreciate your patience as we work to improve our performance in service to you.
SSA’s challenges run deeper than poor service, and SSA has fallen short of the public’s expectations on many fronts, in large part attributable to years of stagnant resources coupled with increasing demands on its services. Fundamentally, an approach that starves centralized functions while augmenting only front-line service positions simply does not provide a pathway to the sharp improvements the agency must make to be successful in the current funding environment. A comprehensive strategy that includes technology modernization and a streamlined organizational structure that reduces unnecessary bureaucracy and empowers qualified professionals will go a long way to improve the agency’s public service to current and future beneficiaries of its services. 3uGXkhzIZn33qlqm16tAvppbdvT75xCmAu2S+krWcWw=
I'm glad to see area director and their staff having to come to work. Never understood why they had the need. They didnt work the front lines once they were in those positions.
@6:47PM
There is so much ignorance on display in these comments, and in yours particularly. OHO does not get "hour long lunches." OHO employees, like all other SSA employees, are legally entitled to a 30 minute lunch break and two fifteen minute breaks each 8-hour shift. Some offices within OHO, recognizing that time is fungible, permit employees to combine all of these breaks into one hour-long break in the middle of the day.
By the way, many writers within OHO do not even take a half-hour lunch break because meeting production requirements while producing work of a reasonable quality often simply takes too much time to allow for even a half-hour lunch break.
OK, boomer.
700 am, get out of your mom's basement, stop playing video games, stop blaming your elders for your problems and most of all, please get a life
10:57 okboomer
He is falling in to the trap where he believes that those who came before him were morons.
I've heard AFGE will file grievance and unfair labor practice, regarding what has happened to our telework. I hope something can be done, the morale is terrible where I work in a payment center. Rumors are rampant too, that they are considering ending our credit hours and putting us on a fixed shift. There is much less work being done because of all of this turmoil and seeming disregard by upper management for the SSA employees.
7:06 thanks for ripping of the tax payers by doing less work.
Your “Thanks” should be directed to management, especially Senior Management, whose repeated anti-labor/employee Agenda and poor decisions do nothing more than dig the hole deeper and deeper. Don’t forget many of these individuals have been brought back as Re-employee Annuitants, former favorites, and are being paid full annuity and salary at taxpayers expense, under the false pretenses they are, “Desperately needed,” and nothing could be further from the truth. So, you still want to denigrate SSA line employees for their very human response to Unfair Labor Practices? I suggest you reconsider who is really fleecing your/taxpayers money, because it is NOT line SSA employees.
AFGE made some huge mistakes in signing the new contract, and allowing SSA management to do what they have done in the last week, especially their actions to completely shut off telework.
SSA management has now overplayed their hand and this will not stand up before arbitrators, or before the courts. They could have cut back telework to one day per week, tweaked it. But completely ending it goes too far.
Commissioner Saul pays lip service to caring about employee work-personal life balance, but I am afraid that his heavy handed actions shows what he really thinks about SSA employees.
Yes I agree low employee morale which will inevitably come from this, is a natural human reaction. This will cause severe and long standing damage to the service SSA employees can provide to the public.
@6:19 am OP here. My comment was based on personal experience as an SSA ALJ for many years, now (thankfully) retired. I worked in several hearing offices and every one of them referenced ODAR/OHO's "tradition" of hour long lunches ALONG with two 15 minute breaks. And everyone I knew at those offices took advantage of it. It is worse in Falls Church. Sorry you can't take your lunch or breaks. My recollection of many of the draft decisions I received confirms my observation that most DW/AAs don't have the same concerns about quality that you express.
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