From Government Executive:
Officials with the nation’s largest federal employee union on Monday sounded the alarm on the staffing crisis at the Social Security Administration, warning that without a substantial budget increase and fundamental workforce policy changes, customer service could deteriorate even further. ...
At the Social Security Administration, staffing levels are at a 25-year low, despite ever increasing numbers of beneficiaries. ...
Although Congress appropriated around $785 million in additional spending for Social Security in the fiscal 2023 appropriations package, officials at the American Federation of Government Employees said after inflation, the impact of the new funding was “negligible.” Workloads for agency employees remain unsustainable, and around 1,000 workers are leaving the agency per month due to burnout and insufficient pay, benefits and workplace flexibilities. ...
Jessica LaPointe, president of AFGE Council 220, which represents field office, teleservice center and workload support unit workers at the agency, said management’s approach to dealing with the staffing crisis is simply making more people want to quit. The union and management are slated to begin renegotiation on six articles of their collective bargaining agreement next week.
“Hiring is down 50% since 2010, promotions are down 25%, and staffing is at a 25-year low,” she said. “Management has assigned workers to intake for most of the work week, so back-end work is now piling up, and managers are resorting to bullying tactics like leveraging leave, micromanagement and surveilling employees’ use of the bathroom to attempt to control back- and front-end productivity of workers . . . Employees are being treated like disposable cogs in a machine, and when an employee burns out and quits, the agency just seeks to replace them.” ...
LaPointe said that the union’s internal survey found that 8% of respondents knew a coworker who died by suicide at least in part due to work-related stress. ...
Edwin Osorio, first vice president of AFGE Council 220, said at least part of the blame can be placed at the feet of Kijakazi, who he said has shown a lack of leadership while atop the agency. ...
24 comments:
A true model employer. If your idea of a model employer is one that makes over half its staff want to quit or literally end their own lives, and that won’t even take steps to improve things even when those steps would cost nothing (or, in the case of making positions remote, would even save money). Nice job, Biden and Kijakazi!
I would be more partial to AFGE's arguments about unmanageable workloads, etc., if they would stop acting like FO employees should have 100 percent telework. It undercuts its other arguments.
Perhaps its time to scrap the whole thing and start over.
Telework is the only good thing we have left at this point. Take that away and you’ll have more people leaving the agency.
They aren’t arguing that field office staff should be converted to remote jobs. They’re saying that conversions to remote should be made for staff whose jobs require to public-facing or in-person work. OGC has already done this. So refusing to do the same for AC reviewers, OHO writers and other staff whose roles are 100% portable just reads as another giant “f*** you” from the top.
It doesn't undercut it's arguments at all. Most other federal agencies have adopted 100% telework and talented candidates are only seeking positions where they can work from home five days a week. The fact that SSA is only offering 40% telework, not to mention uncompetitive salaries, makes it impossible to staff up properly. We end hiring desperate people, who generally are not particularly bright, have awful customer service skills, and poor work ethic.
This is the recipe for the disaster that SSA has become over the past decade.
Whatever the details, on the meta level the GOP loves this stuff. It just sows fear, uncertainty and doubt about a program that they want to kill. Doesn't matter if the details are true, it's the fact this is even happening is enough.
@3:38 exactly. And then we are stuck with these people who can’t do their jobs properly for an eternity while the rest of us work our workloads and theirs as well.
Leadership is absent at the top levels...
Agree with 1:45. Once it gets this broken, there is no repair. Just replacement.
https://bestplacestowork.org/rankings/?view=overall&size=large&category=leadership&
Officially the worst agency! Shockingly, merely asking employees how to improve their morale, without any actual effort to follow their suggestions, did not result in improved morale. Who could have guessed?!
I hope Charles opens a thread on ranking 17 out of 17. I hope to see what everyone thinks the problem is as well as solutions. Genuinely curious how people from different components feel.
Too much work and too little time to do it. Spend half or more of your day answering phones or handling walk in people yet expected to take 6 RSDHI claims. Oh, and send claims to DDS for decisions, pay RSHI claims, etc. The expectation that one can do 12 or more hours of work in 8 hours every day for the foreseeable future. All that and keeping worktrack current, MDWs, CDRs, etc. Crazy!!!
Lets see, you shut down all public access for over two stinking years. You "work from home" knowing full well that things are falling through the cracks, but they are not things, not widgets, not produce or product, they are living breathing human beings that need the services done quickly and properly so they can keep living and breathing.
Then you open up with the most ridiculous amount of restrictions as the rest of the world has returned with no restriction a year or more earlier. On top of an existing backlog, you now have two years of mishandled stuff, delayed stuff, standard stuff and new stuff to do.
The workers, after spending two years on cruise mode, are now faced, and at the offices they are literally faced with all the backlog. But they are in the cruise mode and dont want to be in hunker down and clean this up mode.
So they complain, they leave, they do whatever they can to get back to that two year cruise mode.
And you wonder what happened and where to point the finger. Here I will help.
Management from top to bottom handled the covid crisis poorly. An absolute shut down of public access for an agency thats job is the actual public was stupid and completely ignorant of the mission of the agency.
The union took advantage and when the rest of the world was open and running, and those precious SSA workers were using those services, going to ball games, all that good stuff, the union pushed to stay closed and create
even more absolutely ridiculous policies.
The workers, sorry guys, you all were not superheros in capes here. You got used to doing what you wanted, the way you wanted, and when you wanted really quick. It is hard to unspoil a kid, every parent knows it.
Well, that certainly is a ridiculously uninformed and cynical take. Hate to break it to you, but employee morale was low and the ship was sinking before the pandemic.
8:16 You seem unaware of the fact that many private industry employees are still teleworking Especially those in office jobs. T.
We will never return to pre pandemic days of commuting 5 days a week to crowded offices, either in government or in private industry. This isn't the 1980's, get with the times. Work from hone is the way of the future.
SSA jobs are difficult, complex, stressful, and take years to learn to do well. SSA employees are underpaid, considering the complexity and importance of the work that we do.
Field office employees can do many of their tasks from home,. Two days of telework per week (or more) should continue to be offered to FO employees. Telework is a morale booster, stress reducer, helps retention, and helps in recruitment. Not to mention it keeps employees safer, when they can stay home.
"...8% of respondents knew a coworker who died by suicide at least in part due to work-related stress. ."
My advice:
For intermal promotions, be very careful about which SSA jobs you apply for. It's hard to go back, if you make a mistake.
One coworker in my PC , went into management and then committed suicide. I heard he was very stressed out about his management job.
Systems jobs in Central Operations can also be very stressful.
I work in SEPSC in Bham. About 20 years ago, there was an employee who shot himself in his vehicle in the parking lot. After several hours, a security guard finally noticed...
They stay because they know they cannot get paid the same money for what they do, because there are few transferable skills. If you stay you are staying for a reason and its mostly the money.
I think it is more that people who apply for government jobs are looking for financial stability and probably overvalue the modest pension waiting for them at the end of the rainbow.
The "lack of transferable skills" argument is nonsense. The skills necessary for FO jobs are easily transferrable into private sector customer service and claims handling roles.
8:42 I completely agree with you. People who think they Ssa was running efficiently prior to the pandemic are very mistaken. Work was backlogged, the phones were backlogged and the offices crammed with people with hour(s) long wait times. To suggest that the pandemic and office closure alone created this nightmare is absurd. What happened was during the pandemic people were able to work from home which prompted better work/life flexibilities and decreased stress so many decided to change jobs where they could work from home permanently and many others decided the office stress was not with it and retired or quit. Now the agency has the least amount of employees it’s had in years with continued high work volumes. Hiring new staff is great however it takes 2-3 years to be completely trained so there is not immediate relief upon hiring.
The shut down of office did not create the problem. It amplified it, worsened it, accelerated it and overall made it way way way worse. Anyone that denies that is ignore the facts completely. Sorry y"all were not more productive during that time, if you were the numbers now would not be as bad as they were and the lines when you reopened would not have been as long. Denying that is a straight up lie.
The whole system needs to be torn down and started over. If it takes 3 years to be able to learn then the system is too piled with regulations and rules.
NO other country has this problem. Just right here. It needs to be put out of its misery and something better put in its place. Start with sending SSI back to the States.
For the FO's we can't afford to have more telework days. We don't have enough staff as it is to handle the customers coming in and appts and phones. Our area had 8 hires they were allocated. This big huge push to director hire and weekly DCO meetings on DHA, the they took all 8 hires away... Just like that. Said the areas attrition was not high enough. WTH. My office alone has lost 8 in an office of 24 in 1 yr. But our attrition isn't high enough. Start with pay. Field CS's should easily be 12's. Why would someone come here when they can go to the VA or DHS or anywhere else and get a ladder 12.
In the end, telework is only going to last as long as a Democrat (and specifically Biden) is in the White House. And even he directed OPM the other day to have agencies begin reducing telework. A Republican wins the next election, and telework will go the way of the Dodo 5 minutes after they take the oath of office.
Every day, I hear that crap "well, I was/am much more efficient when I was/am working from home". Well, that efficiency came from the fact that a lot of workloads were deferred and piled up, and at the expense of the people that didn't have a choice and actually had to work in the office while you weren't there.
Honestly, I fully expect management to make it to go away at some point later this year as the next election slowly winds closer.
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