After two years of most of the agency’s offices being closed to the public—except by appointment—due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Social Security Administration reopened its traditional worksites last week.
But labor groups, who in January reached an agreement with the agency to negotiate further on the component level about how reentry would occur, reported that process was a mixed bag, with employees at teleservice centers and the agency’s around 1,200 field offices getting the short end of the stick.
Rich Couture, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 215, which represents employees in the Office of Hearing Operations, and chief negotiator for the union on reentry, said that although some offices, like his own, were successful in reaching agreement ahead of offices reopening last week, the majority were not.
"I can say that generally, with few exceptions, the component council meetings did not achieve their purpose,” he said. “There were whole issues that were not considered appropriate for discussion by the agency. It was primarily telework, but proposals to address process reform, workload management and those types of proposals were given a full hearing, much less discussed.” ...
Angela Digeronimo, president of AFGE Council 220, which represents employees in Social Security field offices and its teleservice centers, said nearly all of her union’s proposals, ranging from increased telework, setting up cohorts that would cycle into the office for a week while others work remotely—to mitigate spread of COVID-19—and preserving some office hours as by appointment only, were all flatly rejected by management. ...
“The agency is saying, ‘We’re critically understaffed,’ and the agency is claiming that it’s because of the appropriations not being sufficient, so staffing will remain flat and we have been for four years. But it’s more than that: it’s the fact that they are not willing to reimagine how we do business with the public and reinvent services so they’re better for the public and also the work-life flexibilities for employees, so we’re not attracting or retaining people.” ...
It is pure fantasy to believe that it will ever be acceptable to close Social Security's field offices so its employees can work from home. This isn't politically acceptable now and it won't be in the future. Union leaders whining about their intense desire that their members not be required to show up for work in the office won't get their members anywhere. Grow up.
27 comments:
Why shouldn't teleservice reps be able to work from home? They have the tools to track calls and work done, so that eliminates slacking.
Yeah, your "grow up" advice won't get you anywhere either.
This inflexibility on the part of management concerning telework and other work life balance issues is why SSA simply can’t attract and retain quality people anymore. And it’s not just in the field. Those who are leaving are not retiring but are going to other agencies. Our hiring has been abysmal and the quality of candidate we are seeing is way below what it was 4 years ago. Limited hiring authorities don’t help.
SSA can’t compete as an employer anymore, and if you can’t hire the best, don’t expect the best service. There is a reason the agency has dropped from one of the best places to work in 2010, when new hires had masters degrees, were young , and didn’t resign during training or the initial two years, to where we are now, generally taking anyone who applies with the minimum KSA’s and watching them cycle out during onboarding or before they reach journeyman status.
There has to be a way to meet in the middle.
We can't ignore the fact that many SSA workers are quitting or retiring. And that SSA has trouble recruiting the best and the brightest to fill these slots.
Young workers especially want flexible work schedules, and the ability to work remotely. SSA must remain competitive in what they offer to workers, and that includes maximum telework. Otherwise, young bright college graduates will work elsewhere where they are offered telework.
It's better to have a highly skilled and trained technician working from home, than someone in an office who does not understand the job, who only stays because they don't have any other options.
The Agency missed a grand opportunity to change the way they do business. For two years Agency officials should have been looking at how to function in an underfunded world. Instead, they can up with convoluted "strategies and flexibilities" for the field office upon return. In the three full days our office has been open to the public, we have had 70% of our visitors requesting replacement cards, 1099s and benefit verifications. These are actions that need to be done online, except for a few of the replacement ssn cards. Unfortunately, signing up for a MySSA account is cumbersome and not efficient. Again, the Agency had years to plan for a re-entry and they did nothing!
Working from home is fine if you're working. If people make an appointment to apply for disability, take it instean of mailing them the 3368 without seeing how easily they can complete the form.
I work in a Payment Center and we now have to go into the office one day per week. People can choose their day to come in, so there is about 1/5 of the office there on any given day.
We still can't have in person group meetings or training because 80% of the office personnel is not there. I'm not sure what is accomplished by making us go in, to sit in a cubicle and do the same work we were doing at home.
The supervisor tracks our cases on paperless at both home and office so there is no difference there.
Charles, why are you so anti-union. You have no idea what goes on inside this Agency. It is failing by design. Your headline should have been "SSA management committed to incompetent stewardship with argumentative style"
We lose 2 programmers in the coming weeks. Why? Pay cuts. We never get COLAs comparing to inflation, we always get it after the fact and once you have stepped out, unless you find opportunities to advance to, you only lose money year in and year out.
We are losing both of them to the private sector. Wonder how long it will be until we can hire to replace them....
Like 10:16 indicated, telework may not be a requirement, but when it comes to hiring, SSA has nothing to offer needed hires.
Used to work at SSA, at both a FO and in Central Office. Was an AFGE union rep while in the field. All the talk about how the work can be done as well at home as at the office is overly broad - some work fits perfectly for WFH, other workloads not so much. Public facing jobs are inherently "public facing" for a reason and after the debacle of how poorly SSA served the public during the shutdown, claiming WFH is the only answer to the question deliberately misinterprets the question. Back in the day, (2015) I'd have walked into my FO, waited for a rep, asked my questions and walked away with what I need. Including a name and date of who provided me the information. Maybe 2 hours total, most of that my time. I spent 3x that on 800 number calls with non-answers and bad answers, and more contacting my congressman's office and likely wasted the time of multiple higher paid employees on the Hill and at their SSA's contacts to get that same should be easy to get answer (if you can speak to someone who knows what they are doing). The focus of the union seems to ignore the aspect of public service where one provides actual service to the public on how they want to do it. For some things online is fine, 800 number could be fine but some things need a face to face, not some unknown voice on a phone whose accountability to me is nebulous at best. I reject the idea of an appointment only access to a service paid by my taxes.
And by the way, instead of taking advantage of a pro-union environment and grabbing what one can, the union pisses off management more than they need to so when the GOP has control again (and that could come soon), the ban hammer on unions will swing pretty hard and the current attitude of unions will let the GOP decide it's time for a Patco type lesson again. And management will not look at the union as a partner but a PITA. One isn't anti-union to speak truth to power and the union is mis stepping here. The pendulum on WFH is swinging and some employers are playing hardball.
The notion that there is more accountability in person than over the phone is laughable at SSA.
The is no accountability period.
If so inclined, all I’d have to do is mess up most of the cases that I’m given. On my office, we have so few people, they wouldn’t fire me because they wouldn’t put me on a performance plan because management doesn’t want to do the work it would take to get rid of a journeyman technician.
I see people play that game all the time. Trust me, once you’ve screwed up enough cases, even the public won’t want you touching their case anymore.
9:23 To say there is no accountability at SSA, is simply not true.
I work in a payment center and management keeps track of every case I work. With paperless, they know exactly how many are in my queue and how many I work on on a daily basis, whether I am working at home or in the office.
A certain percentage of my cases are picked up at random, for quality review and thoroughly reviewed. If there is an error then I have to correct it and also the error goes on my record, management keeps track of these too.
If I don't work enough cases or if I get too many errors, I could lose my job and be demoted. I have seen this happen to several employees.
Fighting over telework, beating people up over wanting more telework, etc. is all a second order fight. Let's not forget the first order fight providing the backdrop for all of this: too small budgets for SSA for over a decade now.
It's just silly and distracting to fight over what methods/strategies/choices are good or bad at SSA when SSA is guaranteed to run poorly with the tiny budget it has, leading to the small number of employees and lack of investment in, e.g., overhauling systems bringing them into the 21st century; training new employees; etc.
How much sense does it make to talk about the intricacies of a situation that was created by lack of funding and won't ever meaningfully improve without tons more funding? Y'all are just playing the blame game roasting each other while not giving a second of that fire to the folks who are actually responsible for the actual problem here. Kudos.
I blame Congress.
I don't dispute that the agency probably needs more funding to handle the administrative workload. However, I always wonder why anytime the government tries to solve a problem the answer is always to throw more money at it. About accountability, why is no one being held accountable for the failure to upgrade the agency's IT systems over the years? I'm sure this would increase efficiency and save money. What about other ways to be more efficient and save money? We see DDS wasting thousands and thousands of dollars on envelopes and postage. Many days we receive a huge stack of large flat envelopes from DDS with each having no more than a few sheets of paper in them. These could be put in one flat rate envelope and save a lot of money. I bet, if someone really tried, the agency could find ways to save money and use it to hire more staff where needed. And, to all the bellyaching employees and the union, you probably better be grateful for what you have. The agency could easily contract out some of this work and pay employees 1/2 of what you are making and provide fewere benefits, doubling the workforce for the same amount of money. And, I bet the results would be better. If the union keeps pushing, people will start talking about that seriously.
@11:32
You’re in the PC and don’t provide face-to-face service so we get blamed for your messes in the field constantly. And I know my office sends crap work to the PC because I see it. Those are precisely the people I’d love to see fired!
As for accountability, fine, I’m speaking from personal experience so maybe I’ve just been in really awful offices. I see it all the time though so I can only speak to what I have witnessed.
The agency is awful.
I am so confused. I cant tell any longer if SSA is filled with majestic practitioners of the dark arts of SSA with intense levels of knowledge beyond that of mere mortals, or the left over people from Indeed with no skill or knowledge.
Help!
8:38 -- I'll take "things that never happened" for $100, Alex. You were never a FO union rep. Stop it.
10:32: 11:32 here.
I never applied for the FO positions because I knew those jobs, with the public contact requirements, would be stressful, compared to the Payment Center where I work.
I feel blessed to have my US Government job, with relatively low pressure, salary, health benefits, retirement, leave, etc. I am not sure I'd feel that way if I worked in FO.
9:25
When the agency workloads explode with the baby boomer retirement wave in the last 20 years, the agency needs better funding. Staffing is less than what it was 20 years ago. The big expenses for the agency are on building leases and staff to do agency work. SSA needs people to do the work and that costs money.
I always heard from people who work for SSA, who had worked elsewhere or had spouses who worked in another govt agency. They would tell me how good it was, there was money for this teambuilding or that incentive. My response was that SSA is an "underprivileged" agency. My take is that SSA budgets are very closely managed and this has dramatically increased in the last 15 years.
Penny pinching on postage is exactly that. I get it and I don't like the waste of OHO or DDS spending 4 or 5 times what they should on postage. Lets get real, though. Suppose we lock down on that and save $10,000 a week (which is really generous) - that equates to $520,000 a year. You might just get 8 GS 11s. Not a huge bump, compared to the short side of 60,000 agency staff.
My job at SSA is 100% portable. I'm held to productivity standards as well as benchmarks that ensure cases aren't stagnant. I can assure you that if I allow a case to become stagnant, my local management team will alert me. They in turn will be alerted by a regional manager. Moreover, my husband has comorbidities that increase his chance of severe Covid despite being fully vaxxed. Why shouldn't those of us who have portable work be allowed to work from home as long as our productivity remains high? I think the issue is when the Agency allows those who don't perform to continue teleworking.
40 years ago SSA staff was over 80 thousand employees. Why does anyone think reducing staff every decade will result in good service? Before I retired in 2011, the agency went the route of eliminating most service reps. Employees who were just OK service reps at the front desk, and some claims development clerks were promoted to claims reps. Most of them were not qualified and wouldn't have been hired to be claims reps in any other scenario. And yet, the agency thought this was great. So then we had to take turns once a week at the front desk, reducing the time I spent on my workload by 20%. I had a conversation with a manager from another office pointing this out. She admitted she never thought of it that way. I'm so glad I retired when I did. Too many people bashing the people working at the bottom rung. Too many changes from on high without understanding the effects of the changes.
The morale at SSA was terrible when Saul abruptly terminated telework for no good reason. His authoritarian right wing moves against SSA workers and against the union had predictable effects.
SSA acting commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi is a huge improvement. I commend her for letting us telework for two years. And even now SSA employees have a lot of telework days. She is a huge improvement over Saul, she treats employees with respect.
Morale at SSA is much improved.
9:01 - You clearly DO NOT work in the FO. Morale at SSA might be improved in the Area offices, Regional offices, and HQ...but employee morale in the FOs is unequivocally NOT much improved.
Try again.
9:01 the morale is as high as the 5th ring of H811. We recently had three new hires. Usually they make it through to OTJ before quitting but this lot (all three of them) bailed before their training was completed. Shortly afterwards, an ADM and a TE stepped down to CS positions. Half of the staff left are actively job hunting.The agency is a dumpster fire right now and the employees are burnt out.
901 definitely does not work in the field. I’m thinking a troll quite frankly. Or mgmt.
anon@5:18pm,
I agree. I've been seeing them post a lot more here recently in between employee posts.
Charles, you must be doing something right to get the attention of the agency's public propaganda wing. Keep it up!
After 2 years of working from home it’s weird to sit in the office answering phones or taking phone claims and think”I could be doing this crap at home”. There is no longer a need to have 10 people in an office. Have enough to cover recep and everyone else can be home doing phone claims and answering phones. You can shrink the offices with this which will save money. Anyone ever see the leases for these offices? Some are close to 30k per month! Say all field offices were 20k, 20k x1200(offices) that’s 24,000,000per month or 288,000,000 per year. When you tell management “I can do this all at home” they all reply “ it’s nice seeing everyone’s faces”.
All entries- I just retired from PC7 in Baltimore HQ in January 2022. I can attest that even though I worked from home because of Covid 19 I was spiralling down these past two years from sheer exhaustion and overwork. Imho all of this fingerpointing back and forth between FO and PC staff is counter productive. We all are trying to uphold a mighty ideal to help those less fortunate than ourselves. I sincerely believe that Mgmt and Staff and the Union have become siloed into differing "solutions" in trying to solve the budget/staffing issues sometimes working at cross purposes. I.e, the three "blind" men describing the different parts of the elephant. They all had a "right" description for their respective part, but were not working together to resolve an intractable problem, it was an elephant. Sorry this thrashing each other only hurts not help. Come on people work together or SSA will someday be gone. Privatized out to big corporations like those who now want to sunset Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SSI. Look out the next job you lose may be your own. Even though I was severely burnt out, I never lost sight of why I worked for SSA in the first place, the disabled, elderly or orphaned/survivors who look at that Social Security check for survival, for some the only money they ever will have. An SSA retiree with 47 years of work experience in government service, 27 in Baltimore PC7.
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