From the Baltimore Sun:
… Martin O’Malley has been called to testify before the House Oversight Committee next month about an agreement he signed to allow some Social Security employees to work remotely through 2029.
O’Malley signed the agreement in late November, two days before leaving his Social Security Administration position.
James Comer, a Republican representative from Kentucky who serves as the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, wrote in a letter to O’Malley that his agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees to guarantee a minimum amount of telework for 42,000 Social Security employees through 2029 “will tie the hands of your successor at SSA for the duration of the next administration, and beyond.”
24 comments:
The Republicans are not on a revenge tour! They only want to dot the i's and cross the t's. The last time I checked, the House of Representatives have a small majority and will have difficulty passing any meaningful legislation without the Democrats. Put this on Santa’s list in the wishful thinking category.
Legal issue as to overturning the agreement. It is however clearly a bad faith decision against the new administration and an example of the deep state mentality that will not help the Dems in the long run.
Of course it can be overturned. The signing was next to criminal by O'Malley. Who in their right mind gives away the agency's right to determine where employees work at the highest levels?
O'Malley should face additional scrutiny as he only gave telework to union-represented employees, and to my knowledge gave nothing to non-union employees. Even though I believe in maximum telework, no administration should be able to bind the next administration in such a fashion, and that goes for BOTH parties. Merry Christmas to Charles and the commenters.
Productive SSA workers that do not work directly with the public should be able to work where they want. Non Productive, back to work.
Manager here. Or maybe praise needs to go to AFGE for being on the ball to ask for the adjustments. If the other bargaining units didn’t ask… It isn’t AFGE’s fault. And it seems AFGE did give up some ground in the adjudication time MOU so these two things combined can be seen as a give and take.
O'Malley doesn't work at SSA anymore and the deal is already done. It's a waste of time and taxpayer dollars for Rep. Comer to have hearings to complain about it.
Maybe O'Malley should ignore the idiots. I'm sure the republicans would never do anything to tie the hands of the next administration. No, never. Among other things, they violate all the rules of god and man to rush trump's nominees onto the supreme court and delay democratic nominees.
Everything can be overturned. We have the best legal system money can buy!
From what I've been reading in the Washington Post, it will be hard for the Republicans to get out of the AFGE/O'Malley telework agreement. It would be a violation of federal law to order SSA employees back to the office and ignore the existing labor agreement.
GOP leaders Ramaswamy, Musk, and Greene tipped their hands, right after the election, with their ignorant rants about forcing all federal employees back to the office.
Commissioner O'Malley heard this and realized this RTO order would be a disaster for SSA, resulting in an exodus of skilled and experienced workers. He also realized productivity was better with flexibility to work from home.
His action to sign the agreement was therefore in the best interests of SSA and for the nation as well.
You still believe O'Malley was working in the best interests of the agency and not playing politics. That's cute!
Never have the public and employees had a policy that was so beneficial to both. Just ignore the complaints of poor service as measured by most metrics.
Not true at all 5:36. O'Malley forced a large number of employees back and caused them to quit, just ask Human Resources. Now he's just currying favor with the unions to try to help him with his DNC bid. He's a fraud.
Legit question to FO workers. At my holiday parties I spoke to many family members and friends who told me SSA was bogged down by long hold times. They asked why field office people were "working" from home when they couldn't get through. Do FO employees actually accomplish more with teleworking or does production lag? At OHO we get so much more done from home. If that's not true at field offices, shouldn't you all be back in five days a week?
Field Offices have lots of different types of work with answering the phones being a very small part. Yes, FO employees are productive at home. It is also true that phone answer rates are abysmal. But they’re abysmal because we don’t have sufficient staff to answer the phones and serve walk-in visitors and take appointments and process reams of paper and sort through ever changing policy that becomes more complex by the minute and work the ad hocs and do all of the other work.
Plus, systems are atrocious. In October, the phone system was migrated to another platform which has resulted in hideous phone service.
As an FO ADM, I can tell you that challenges are legion, but telework is not one of them. And nothing will change/improve if telework is eliminated.
The only thing the Field Office does in the office that can't be done remote is reception. And if you're in reception, you're not doing anything else. Reception is about 10% of what the FO does.
More gets done from home. Full stop. Phone reception, claims, back-end processing, all done better without the distractions of being in noisy, unpleasant offices. Your family can't get through because everything is broken and everyone is leaving.
Sure, send everyone back 5 days a week, then when everything continues to get worse they'll just have to come up with some new excuse about how it's those lazy, entitled, fat cat bureaucrats who don't want to work that are the problem, while CSs and CSRs quit, medicate, or off themselves because of the stress of trying to do the work of 5 people and not having time to help someone with terminal cancer get benefits because they have to go process card applications for 7 hours.
All while getting yelled at for how worthless they are by management, congress, and your family. It's bad now, but it can get so, so much worse.
There are numerous problems with telework for FO employees. The only problem is most aren't willing to admit it. The elephant in the room or the giant lie is that a massive majority, management included, won't admit the failings of telework because they so desperately want it themselves. I'll list a few. Training - training sucks remotely. While some may be fine learning remotely, most are not. It's interesting that we are now pushing to get so many people signed off on training. It's almost to say, we gotta get all these failed training situations off the books because it looks bad. Yeah it looks bad, but it also IS bad. We were terrible at effective training before telework. Telework just supercharged our suckiness. We separated trainees and mentors, and then took the provision out of the contract that would have required trainees to be in the office. But the "training" problem isn't just a trainee problem. See, the work at SSA is very difficult for many in the FO. Even our very best and brightest struggle to have all the answers. In the FO, having a good timely answer for the public makes many problems go away. Independent handling is often a fallacy. Employees helping customers at the front desk, on the phone, or in claims often are pressed with questions they can't answer and they really don't have time to look up. So we are better together in person to quickly get questions answered. Now we either have people making things up to tell customers, or employees are trying to get answers via Skype (which is going away and very slow compared to an in person answer), or employees in office are hitting up the few in office they can ask or management onsite for solutions. They are often left with non ideal people to go to because the people that really should be asked or those that are the local experts are teleworking. So they get the best answer they can but it's often not a quality answer so it leads to a mistake, or a repeat visit or phone call. Staff meetings used to be one of the times we could come together and identify our weaknesses or talk through our problems. Well, those have been rendered ineffective. Not having everyone in the room together has made these meetings ineffective. Sure, some offices have tried to go to hybrid meetings (in office staff gathered together combined with video for those at home), but they are not as effective as good old fashioned in person meetings. There are many problems connecting meetings effectively and the agency has done nothing to support getting better tools in the hands of FOs. I'm talking about proper camera systems, mics, and speakers to support a hybrid meeting. The agency basically says you have a laptop, that should be good enough. It's not. Something that is fascinating is FOs are forced to have meetings remotely routinely but when Area Director visits occur, they ask us to suspend telework so we can have a good meeting. Well, let's just say that has a very bad look to it. The important people are rolling into town, so now we need to try and have an effective and appropriate meeting, yet we would be shunned for regularly suspending telework for a local weekly or biweekly meeting or training with staff.
Mail is a giant problem. We have many printing problems with remote work. Mail goes out later than it used to. Some employees only send out mail once a week now. They flounder and create multiple prints of the same thing or with minor corrections (print two of the same thing but slightly different) only to return to the office after their telework days and not know what was right. We have more PII loss due to massive print releases.upon return from telework. Prints are all jumbled together.
Cont - The worst situation is when an employee returns to the office and experiences a major print problem. They may then lose the entire batch of prints. In these situations it's impossible to know what may have been in the print queue, so things go unsent. We are disadvantaging customers due to telework and nobody cares. All that matters is that we have telework.
We continue to be plagued by systems issues - phones and computers that don't work. Telework only pits these problems on steroids. Rather than be able to help customers or other staff in some way when we have systems issues, we have employees doing nothing at times because they should call the "help desk".
We have days with dysfunctionally low levels of onsite staffing to support customer or employee needs onsite. We are able to recall employees to the office if needed but that doesn't really work. Recalled employeeshave two hours to report to the office on agency time. That doesn't work particularly when you learn at 830 people aren't going to show up, and the doors open at 9am.
The episodic telework MOU only made things more complex and troublesome for the FO. We have people in headquarters locations signing off on agreements.thst don't help FOs. It would appear some of these agreements are done in their best personal interest. There is a lot of that going on these days. Nobody cares though. Nothing to see here.
There are so many ways we are worse than we were but when all levels can't admit the failings because it serves their personal interest nothing will change for the better.
Then, to make matters worse we had our outgoing COSS attempt to codify our eternal suckiness through 2029 to "save SSA staffing and productivity". I call BS.
4:27, none of those things you're complaining about are caused by telework. None of those things you're complaining about will be solved by 100% RTO. Many, many things will be made worse though. But keep distracting every TE and CS in your office every time someone up front has a question, they super love that when they're in the middle of a complex computation or claim input. Nothing like doing a 30 minute task 5 minutes at a time!
Training has been terrible for a decade. It got worse before telework. The awful training isn't caused by telework. Everything you listed is from bad funding or bad leadership. But if you want scapegoat the people at the bottom, knock yourself out. Just don't you dare act confused when RTO doesn't fix everything
Stick with the script. Telework only helps. It's all roses and no pain. Got it. Your argument against interrupting CTEs and CSs, who would you have them interrupt btw? They are to rot at the front desk or on the phone for an hour not knowing how to help someone? I've seen it. It doesn't work. That's one of the fatal flaws of this so called productivity gain at home. Because you don't have to be interrupted, you can get more work done. But I'd ask again, who answers the questions then? Apparently, it's not you. I bet you were the real helpful type IN the office as well. Enjoy the party at home my friend. You are part of the problem.
Fascinating and heated discussion. As a non-FO HQ worker, it sounds like there are three major issues: 1) a lack of institutional knowledge, 2) a lack of training and specialization, and 3) general disorganization. The first can be somewhat solved by management and workers without a major budget increase: if you learn something, write it down and share it across the FOs. Instead of starting from scratch on each question, keep that knowledge handy. The second as well: whoever is good at training gets paired with someone knowledgeable, and you teach not just upon onboarding but throughout the year. The third may require more hiring, but also could be solved by better software and a better use of tech. My heart goes out to FO workers though. Tough gig.
Training has gone downhill since in person classroom training stopped ages ago. Each "development" since has only made it worse. I thought it was pretty bad before Covid and then Covid made it much worse. Watching animated videos on laptop doesn't do it. Some recently trained employees may be very good if they had decent training. A few are despite the disastrous training they've endured.
Late but on vacation. No worse a bad faith decision than preventing Obama to name a SC justice.
There has never been a time when training was good in person or otherwise, because no single section or entity seems to know where all of the law and policy is kept, let alone provide a comprehensive understanding of it. Each role is so complex that people learn 15 years into the job that they’ve been doing it wrong the whole time because the process was written in a transmittal or an email they missed. In 30 years, there hasn’t been a day without work riddled with technical or legal error, explanation to someone who should know better that the error exists, and pushback on the correct solution because ego, so harm to public. Hey let’s keep all these errors worsening by making each FO employee do 8 different jobs without tech or staff support.
But sure, let’s increase pollution and traffic in an era where I can see my colonoscopy results electronically same-day, but have to send paper mail and hope the government actually receives and processes it because…angry boomers?
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