From Government Executive:
Officials with the American Federation of Government Employees said Friday that leadership at the Social Security Administration is instituting fulltime telework for the vast majority of the agency’s workforce beginning next week.
After weeks of resistance as the coronavirus outbreak grew, Social Security officials told union leaders on a conference call Friday that effective Monday, all of the agency’s teleservice centers would be closed. Every employee who is able to take phone calls remotely will do so from home, while those who cannot will be on weather and safety leave until the agency can acquire and distribute more softphones, a technology where employees can take phone calls on behalf of the agency through their laptops.
Additionally, the vast majority of employees of the agency’s processing and payment centers also are working from home. Those who already had telework agreements began working remotely on Thursday, while all other employees were trained to telework that day and began working from home on Friday.
Field offices, which were closed to the public earlier this week, will be fully shuttered by Tuesday at the latest. Most employees will move to telework at that point, although a “very limited” number of people may be recalled on occasion to handle nonportable work like the mail and facility issues, said Ralph Dejuliis, president of AFGE Council 220. ...
Hearings office employees also mostly are working from home full time now. But AFGE Council 215 President Rich Couture said some employees can be recalled to handle telephonic hearings.
“These hearings can be recorded remotely, so I’ve been working with hearings operations to get that applied more broadly so that they can further mitigate the need for anyone to come in at all,” Couture said. ...
7 comments:
They waited until numerous SSA employees tested positive for COVID-19. Saul is the most reviled COSS in the history of SSA.
Biden will can him Day 1 and I will pop a bottle of champagne that evening.
SSA officials who were responsible for cutting telework, and who then resisted reinstating it even as the coronovirus threat grew , should have to pay with their jobs for their incompetence and their heartless, shortsighted decisions.
Even now they don't get it, no apologies for what they did on telework (a huge mistake which threatened employee health).
SSA managers are already sending semi-threatening Emails to stressed out newly teleworking employees about "accountability" and "managers closely monitoring your work". Saul's favorite word, accountability, yet he isn't held accountable for his own mistakes on telework.
Saul and his minions still think that SSA's backlogs are caused by lazy SSA employees who can't be trusted to do their job while teleworking, even though the great majority of employees are working as hard and fast as we can.
Part of me strongly suspects this wouldn't have happened without New York, California, and Illinois calling for everyone to shelter in place.
The Region 6 Chief ALJ held a telephone conference for Attorney in the Region (Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana) yesterday. I participated in the call. The Chief ALJ reported that OHO will be closed to the public for at least the next 2 weeks. She listed the following work that would be performed by the staff: doing telephone hearings, writing decision, preparing electronic records, developing records, looking for cases to do On-The-Record Decisions, Scheduling hearings, determining critical cases. Later in the question and answer portion she stated that another function during this crisis would be Attorney Fee Petitions. The Attorney and the client have to agree to do the telephone hearing.
There were 15 questions asked by the audience. Some of the highlights of those questions were: 1.) That the 5 day rule will be somewhat relaxed due to the fact that the healthcare providers may be short-staffed and cannot get the records out timely; 2.) That the offices will be in operation from 8:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Hearings scheduled after 2:00 p.m. will be rescheduled; 3.) The OHO staff has been trained to use the telephone equipment and it can accommodate enough incoming calls to handle the hearings; 4.) The DDDs are open and are making decisions; 5.) An attorney had a telephone hearing this week. The ALJ told the attorney that he would not allow a hearing where the client was in the same room with the attorney. The ALJ said that the attorney might pass notes to the client about what to say etc. The Regional Chief ALJ affirmatively stated that the ALJ is not right and the clients and the attorneys have the right to be in the same office during the telephone hearings; 6.) The Regional Chief ALJ do not know if attorneys could use video equipment owned by other attorneys that is acceptable to SSA.
I appreciate the fact that the Regional Chief ALJ did this telephone conference. It answered some nagging questions. It also gave us a little more insight into what happens next.
I have talked to several of my clients with upcoming hearings. I did not try to influence their decision but I told them that we do not know how long this situation will last.
In the past 10 months I have faced possible flooding of my home and possibly my office, a burned foot that took two months to heal, a pinched nerve in my back and right leg that took 6 weeks to heal and now the virus. Throughout all of that I have not missed a day of work. Even during the virus I have continued to work and socially distance myself. My office once had 14 employees (about 10 years ago). Now I just have one employee and myself. My employee is at one end of the office and I am at the other end. We rarely have clients come into the office, most of our work is done by phone and mail. Finally, my work with SSA is done electronically, by FAX and now by phone. My work with the Federal Courts is done electronically. All of my civic meetings, my church activities and social activities are cancelled.
As noted in comments to previous posts, Chicago Regional executives are still requiring management to be onsite 5 days per week to manage staffs that are working entirely from home. Is this a nationwide issue? The fact that SSA chooses to ignore a statewide shelter in place order is infuriating. The point of the order is to reduce exposure, which spreads the disease exponentially. Onsite SSA management is not an essential function. Most tasks (all?) can be done at home. But the executives are determined to exert some form of control when being forced to do the right thing. At the employee level, this control is exerted by requiring "coverage" until 4:30 p.m. while at the same time severely restricting credit hours. Employees have been told that they should be able to complete all of their essential tasks within their regular tour of duty, and that credit should rarely if ever be needed. Shouldn't the opposite be true? To ensure that we can adequately serve the public, shouldn't we be utilizing the flexibility of telework to work those extra hours and get the job done? In effect, this is forcing fixed shifts upon staff.
Meanwhile, employees are being forced to waste valuable time filling out spreadsheets accounting for every task done in a day while teleworking, down to the number of items worked and the amount of time needed to complete those items. Dealing with those spreadsheets at the management level is an additional waste of valuable time that could be used in serving the public.
I wonder how the DDSes are going to handle CE appointments? Are they going to delay scheduled appointments, or are they going to expect the claimants to go to a crowded office and wait to be seen? I haven't seen anything about this.
Anonymous 3:33 AM, March 22
You are so right about the waste of everyone's time filling out and reviewing spreadsheets documenting tasks completed. The proof is in the output seen in the agency's workload data. If managers don't know if work is getting done while on telework, I argue they didn't know what was getting done in the office either.
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