The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has posted updated numbers showing the headcount of employees at each agency. Note that these numbers do not tell the whole story. They don't account for part time employees nor for overtime. Overtime is a huge part of the story at Social Security. A Full Time Equivalent (FTE) report would cover that but we seldom see FTE reports. I'm not sure why. Here are Social Security's numbers as of September with earlier headcount numbers for comparison:
- September, 2022 57,754
- June, 2022 58,332
- March, 2022 59,257
- December, 2021 60,422
- September, 2021 59,808
- June 2021 59,707
- March 2021 60,675
- December 2020 61,816
- September 2020 61,447
- June 2020 60,515
- March 2020 60,659
- December 2019 61,969
- December 2018 62,946
- December 2017 62,777
- December 2016 63,364
- December 2015 65,518
- December 2014 65,430
- December 2013 61,957
- December 2012 64,538
- December 2010 70,270
- December 2009 67,486
- December 2008 63,733
20 comments:
SSA uses "work years" to capture fulltime, part time, overtime, and leave.
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/supplement/2022/2f1-2f3.html#table2.f3
"A workyear (WY) is a measure of time spent doing work or being paid for some element of time (e.g., leave). It is the equivalent of one person working for one year (2,080 hours) and may consist of regular hours, overtime, or lump sum leave, which is payment for unused annual leave upon leaving the agency. WYs include time spent in full-time or part-time employment. Full-time equivalents and overtime WYs include those funded from dedicated funding to reduce the hearings backlog, dedicated funding for IT modernization, and dedicated funding for PI. In addition, the WYs include those funded for the Medicare Low-Income Subsidy Program and the State CHIP"
https://www.ssa.gov/budget/FY23Files/2023BO.pdf
A disproportionately large number of those losses are from attrition of decision-writers. There are now nearly mire ALJs than there are decision writers in OHO, even though it takes about 2-3 writers per ALJ to process the work. Yet, for reasons I don’t think anyone can understand, SSA has continued to spend huge sums of money to hire more ALJs, while making no apparent effort to hire and retain writers. Meanwhile, the VA is paying higher salaries for comparable work, and allows its writers the freedom to work remotely from anywhere in the US. If you can’t clearly see where this is heading, then you’re probably an executive-level manager at SSA.
Get ready for the numbers to drop even more if SSA pulls telework completely after March 2023.
Or more people will stay as telework is a disaster and new hires aren't staying cause they can't get the support.
Are State Agency employees that are fully paid by the SSA counted in Social Security FTE's?
Our new hires aren’t teleworking. The training is awful though.
No. And the situation is even more dismal in those offices.
@3:01 new hires are not allowed to telework? Does this hurt recruitment? Also why is the training bad. Is this like the initial training for new people? It used to be good when I was a CS on IVT.
New hires are allowed to telework 2 days per week but our management thought it would be better to be physically in the office.
The training is a disaster. There appears to be no live person available. It’s just them sitting at their desk all day staring videos for 4 months.
To make it worse, they were all hired at different times so none of them are learning the same topics together so there’s no discussion.
To top it off, we’re so short staffed that the trainees get pulled a lot to work The front and you can imagine how that goes. Tons of misinformation and wrong forms etc.
We’re in particularly bad shape at my office. I’m sure they’re not all this bad.
Terminating or reducing telework will result in greater staff losses. SSA is already hanging on by a thread. People who say terminating telework will only improve service fail to realize how far service has fallen because work/life conditions in SSA are failing. If you really believe service will improve with less telework, you have not seen how bad it will get. The trend has been downwards and continues to accelerate. Committing to the existing telework will help SSA from continuing to take on much more water.
The training issue is a a lack of having dedicated staff to train because staff are either doing social security cards all day or answering the GI line. Losing more experienced resources will not assist with training new staff.
SSA pulls telework and that would mean a mass exodus of immediate retirements and resignations. Losing experienced technicians would be disastrous at least in the short run.
Why pull PSC and RCC telework when the jobs can be done perfectly well from home?
@11:58 - Is there speculation that will happen? Employees have been given the impression by leadership that some form of telework will continue permanently. They know they need to offer it for recruitment purposes.
The agency training is computer-based presentations and videos that they advertise as "self-paced".
The real training is still OJT and mentor-led, which of course leads to wildly varying results even within the same office (and even from the same mentor).
If they were throwing a ton of hires down the pipeline, we'd get enough to stick that it would still alleviate the problems SSA is facing. But we're getting maybe 1 to 2 hires a year in our (level 1) office. Attrition is slowly killing us.
Simple fix. Need to hire more workers. The SSA seemingly hires less workers all the time.
@12:05: You and I are clearly talking about very different groups of employees here. My office is not public facing, has not hired any new non-supervisory staff in years, and has lost about half it’s staff over the past three years. And those remaining are headed for the exits because they’re sick and tired of continuing to be forced to live in one of the nation’s most expensive housing markets because the agency (despite acknowledging it sees no reason to end full-time telework for these workers) continues to insist they live within 120 miles of an essentially vacant office building they haven’t even seen in three years now.
@12:05 forced to stay in the area because there was never any intention of making full-time telework permanent. Do you really think they will bring back the workers in DC and let SSA stay at home? That announcement is gonna be fun...
The agency was approved for Direct Hire Authority through 2024. This should help tremendously, as MGMT's hands were tied for the past decade and forced to hire what I would define as "bottom of the barrel military vets" who either were incompetent and thought they were owed a lifetime civil service job or were competent but only stayed with the agency for a short time before a more desirable position opened up with the VA, DHS, or CBP.
Now we can finally hire bright civilians with no military background, including recent college graduates. However, I doubt those folks are going to want to work here.
It is a depressing situation all around and was totally avoidable
We have hired some “recent college grads”. One has a Masters degree and the other was finishing theirs.
The one that was finishing left after 2 months saying this agency was a mess. The other with a Masters could care less about this job. He took it just to pay bills while the plans are to move after the winter and leaving the agency.
So we will be down again after that and hiring two more and starting over again.
This will be the third new hire out of 5 we have lost.
Telework or office, doesn’t matter. We are too short staffed to have adequate time to devote to trainees. Same applies to the work. I feel certain the work pushed out will remain relatively the same. Just because we are in the office doesn’t mean we can magically do more than we are currently doing with the massive decrease in staff.
Most new hires at HQ Office if Systems (IT) are eligible for full-time TW. The senior people who would train them and/or their supervisors don’t want to come in to oversee them. So, I guess it’s self-study for them.
Many of new hires in the Office of Systems are leaving within a few weeks or few months, and many of the tenured experienced people are leaving for other agencies. Morale is so low BUT the the upper management is trying to improve the Employee Experience.
They sent out “Super Bowl Showdown” themed MS Teams backgrounds we can use in our numerous pointless meetings. So even though MySSA is always down, the DCS employees can now smell like team spirit.
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