ALJs Push Annual Leave Change

     From Government Executive:

Officials with a union that represents administrative law judges at the Social Security Administration are preparing for a push to pass legislation to expand the amount of annual leave they can carry over each year. ...

The Association of Administrative Law Judges said it has been hard at work in recent months to build bipartisan support in Congress for a legislative proposal to increase that cap to 90 days. Officials said the change would be fairer to ALJs who undergo more scrutiny than most other General Schedule employees and could offer a novel way to retain a highly specialized and aging workforce. ...

[The union president] said her organization’s proposal could help the agency in two ways. First, the agency has already seen the headcount of its ALJ corps shrink from 1,645 in 2018 to only 1,170 last year. Data from an internal survey of AALJ members found that in fiscal 2023, SSA administrative law judges forfeited an average of 27 hours of leave per year due to the annual leave cap, compared to just 0.75 hours of forfeited leave on average across the General Schedule from fiscal 2019 to 2023.

At a time when the agency projects the number of initial disability determinations to increase by more than 300,000 this fiscal year—and with them, appeals of those determinations—a boost to the leave cap could allow judges to take more cases. ...

    This sounds like a hard sell to me.

SSA Commissioner Touts Accomplishments

I can't tell. Is that logo in the center a physical object or generated electronically?

     From a Social Security website touting Commissioner Martin O'Malley's accomplishments during his first 100 days in office:

... Between November and April, SSA has reduced the average waiting time from 42 minutes to 24 minutes. Further, no one calling SSA receives busy signals and over 35 percent of our callers now receive a call back instead of holding. ...

SSA is updating its Program Operations Manual System (POMS) so agency employees are no longer forced to require wet signatures from customers where eSignature options are available. ...

[Since the agency's appropriations bill passed] Commissioner O’Malley has lifted the agency-wide hiring freeze and approved 1,600 critical hires for the teleservice centers. We also authorized 1,290 field office hires, 600 hires for the State disability determination services, and 300 hires for our hearing offices. ...

New Union Management Cooperation Councils (UMCCs) - which the Special Advisor to the Federal Labor Relations Authority described as being at the forefront of Union-Management collaboration - are engaged in productive and specific pre-decisional discussions between AFGE and SSA management on a variety of topics including improvements to new-hire training, which has been a key area for improvement towards retention of staff. 

Monthly Labor Roundtables and the UMCC provide regular opportunities to maintain an open dialogue between Labor and Management at all levels of SSA, which improves employee morale and efficient. ...

New Telework Wrinkle

     From Federal News Network:

... Under a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) between SSA and the American Federation of Government Employees, signed March 1, employees can now request “episodic telework” — or extra work-from-home days — when unexpected personal circumstances arise.

The new flexibility, which took effect March 4, gives SSA employees the option to occasionally request taking an extra day of telework in extenuating circumstances. That’s instead of having to take time off or dip into annual leave. ...

Agency spending levels are the next challenge SSA will face. To try to improve services and morale at SSA, AFGE is proposing a supplemental funding package of $20 billion over the next 10 years.

The highly anticipated budget proposal from House and Senate appropriators, which has a deadline of March 22, is unlikely to yield the results AFGE is hoping for.

“We’re severely underfunded in our operating costs, and current budget talks aren’t signaling that we’re going to get much money this year,” LaPointe said. “So, we’re really getting creative.” ...

Reaction To O'Malley's Decision On Telework

     Tom Temin at Federal News Network has a piece up on the new Commissioner's e-mail to staff decreasing telework for some employees. He is kind enough to refer to this blog by name as "reliable." He quotes several comments made to the post.

    Erich Wagner at Government Executive has a longer piece on the e-mail, particularly to the reaction of Rich Couture, chief negotiator for the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents most Social Security employees. Couture expressed relief at what O'Malley had done. The article says that only 4,000 bargaining unit employees would be affected by the announcement. Here's a quote from Couture:

AFGE is pleased to see [O’Malley] is maintaining telework at current levels, and it’s clear that the commissioner recognizes the importance of telework for workers and their work-life balance, as well as its importance for retention and recruitment efforts,” Couture said. “We’re still in a public service crisis fueled by understaffing and attrition, and one way to maintain staffing levels is by offering telework. A commitment to continuing current telework levels for those employees is critical to keeping the agency’s ability to serve the public intact by keeping our employees working here.

     After almost 100 comments, I cut off commenting on the original post since the comments had become so repetitive but, still, I don't think anyone mentioned something about O'Malley's e-mail that caught my eye. Before signing his name to the e-mail, the Commissioner included the phrase "Yours in solidarity." That word, "solidarity," has long been associated with labor unions.

A Golden Oldie

      It’s a slow time in Social Security world so let me reprise a post from almost ten years ago. The themes coming from shills have changed but the problem hasn’t gone away. I’ve become quicker to delete comments that look phony to me. I do note comments now that appear to me to come from employee unions but it’s hard to tell since there are obvious reasons why many Social Security employees agree with union talking points.

Bombarding This Blog — From November 8, 2013

If you read the comments posted on this blog you might come to the impression that everyone knows that:

• Social Security employees do most of their "work" from at home but they don't really work because they're all lazy. The agency has way too many employees.
• Social Security's Administrative Law Judges are particularly lazy. They approve Social Security disability claims because they're lazy. A lot of the judges are crooks in cahoots with crooked disability claimants and their crooked attorneys.
• Most Social Security disability claimants are just crooks trying to scam the program.
• It's way too easy to get on Social Security disability benefits, especially for "mental illness." Anyone can get on Social Security disability benefits for "mental illness" just by pretending to be crazy.
• SSI child's benefits are the biggest scam. It's nothing but lazy, drug addicted mothers coaching their kids to act crazy. They get child after child on SSI child's benefits and then steal the money to support their drug habits.
• Attorneys who represent Social Security claimants are lazy. They're paid huge sums of money by Social Security but they do nothing for their clients. If anything, they're just crooks who assist their crooked clients in perpetrating fraud.
• There is no money in the Social Security trust funds. The money was all stolen by Democrats. The U.S. government bonds that are supposed to be in the trust funds are meaningless pieces of paper.
• Social Security is going bankrupt.You'll never get back the money you paid in. It's all a scam.

     Some of this comes from individuals legitimately expressing their opinions. However, it's long been apparent to me that most of this is coming from people who have been paid to post online comments about Social Security. Often, these people pretend to be Social Security employees, Social Security claimants or Social Security attorneys. Often, their comments just don't ring true because they're pretending to be someone they're not.

     Does it seem outlandish, even paranoid to think that someone would be paid to post slanted comments online? Take a look at this article from the Baltimore Sun. Officials at the University of Maryland had a problem. They wanted to shift the University's athletic programs from the Atlantic Coast Conference to the Big Ten. They knew that many of the University's alumni would be furious with this move. Here's what they did:

Brian Ullmann, the university's assistant vice president for marketing and communications ... wrote that the school planned to "engage professional assistance in helping to drop positive messages into the blogs, comments and message board sites. I will arrange for this service today." ...

Lee Zeidman, the corporate communications consultant who helped Maryland draft letters and talking points, said Wednesday that it is "standard operating procedure" in the business world to weigh in directly on message boards. "There are special PR agencies who work in the digital space who bombard blogs and newspaper sites where no one puts their name," Zeidman said.

     Who would pay online shills to post on Social Security issues? Pete Peterson and the Koch brothers are the prime candidates. They're tossing around tens of millions of dollars in their fight against Social Security. They certainly wouldn't be going after just this blog. It's quite unlikely they know anything about it. They would mostly be going after message boards at news media sites. However, I don't know that there's any other web site quite like this one where there's an ongoing discussion on Social Security issues. If you're doing an online campaign to malign Social Security both as a social program and as an agency, you're going to come here.
    I wonder how someone who works as an online shill would feel about their job. Would it make them proud? Would they tell their children about what they do for a living?

Summary Of AFGE Contract With SSA

     The American Federation of Government Employees, the biggest labor union representing Social Security employees has released a summary of its recent contract with the agency. Read it and you may develop a greater appreciation for the nitty gritty issues that have to be worked out in a labor contract. Lactation may not be your issue but for some agency employees it’s a very big deal. Labor unions exist to help their members deal with issues that an employer may find inconvenient.

SSA And Labor Union Come To Agreement

     From Government Executive:

The Social Security Administration and the nation’s largest federal employee union on Wednesday announced that they had reached a preliminary agreement to update a portion of their collective bargaining agreement and extend the deal until 2029 ...

Although labor-management relationships at federal agencies often vacillate between collaborative and oppositional depending on which political party controls the White House, Social Security management has had a reputation for having at best strained relations with the agency's unions regardless of who’s in charge. And the first two years of the Biden administration were no exception, with officials from the American Federation of Government Employees frequently sparring with management over issues like post-COVID-19 reentry to traditional office spaces, training and benefits aimed at retaining employees during the agency’s ongoing staffing crisis. ...

The updates include a number of immediate tweaks to current policies as well as an avenue for the parties to work collaboratively to find long-term solutions to improve working conditions.

Key to the effort is the establishment of new union-management cooperation councils, both on the national level and for each agency component with a corresponding AFGE council. At the national level, the parties will meet six times a year and each council will be co-chaired by agency senior leaders and AFGE officials. ...

On training, which employees and union officials have complained currently consists primarily of “self-paced” training documents and webinars and leaves new employees ill-prepared for their complex workloads, the contract immediately requires management to provide adequate time to attend and complete sessions, including learning about policy changes that may be transmitted to employees via email, and adds a follow-up survey for employees to take six months after a session. Those surveys will then help the new cooperation councils develop a new training regimen that Couture said he hoped would leverage hybrid work technology to create virtual classroom learning. ...

Union Complaints About Training

     From Government Executive:

... Rich Couture, president of AFGE Council 215 and the union’s chief negotiator with Social Security management, said a poor “self-taught” training model employed by the agency is leaving new hires unprepared for their duties and already looking for work elsewhere. Council 215 represents Office of Hearing Operations staffers.

“We have folks leaving the agency, because the training stinks,” Couture said. “I’d use another word, but we’re in polite company, but the training is terrible. The mentoring, based on an agency focus group report we just got last week, it looked like it was written by us, saying all the same things [we’ve been saying]. There’s not enough time; there’s not enough accommodation to make sure that it actually works. So instead, our folks are telling us, and they’re telling management when they leave, ‘I feel unsupported, I feel unprepared and I feel set up to fail.’ ” ...

Union Negotiations Start On Monday

     Joe Davidson at the Washington Post reports that negotiations between the Social Security Administration and its largest employee union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), are scheduled to begin on Monday. According to the Post:

... At Social Security, labor relations still are hung over from the anti-union days of the Trump administration. President Donald Trump used executive orders to sharply weaken the ability of unions to bargain with agencies, including through the unilateral imposition of contract provisions. Union leaders say current Social Security leaders don’t want to give up that authority.

A key example is telework, which Republicans claim there is too much of in the federal workforce. Restrictive telework policies were implemented under Trump and the agency now “doesn’t want to give up its power,” [Rich] Couture [of the AFGE] said in a telephone interview. “It doesn’t want to give up its discretion.”

He added, “they won’t guarantee a telework program or telework levels. They won’t negotiate with us over telework, despite at one point promising to do so. That’s a huge issue that they have shown zero actual interest in fixing with us.”

Another key issue is the “very dire situation in terms of service delivery and how much it’s deteriorated in the last couple of years …” Couture said, “stemming from overwhelming workloads, low employee morale … a lack of competitive pay and benefits.” ...

Warnings From Employee Unions

     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. ...

Union Decries Micromanagement

    From Government Executive:

Members of the nation’s largest federal employee union on Wednesday rallied outside of the headquarters of the Social Security Administration near Baltimore, demanding more funding and staffing for the agency, as well as reform of agency leadership and workforce policies. ...

Union officials on Wednesday described an agency in a vicious cycle, where insufficient funding amid growing workloads has led managers to micromanage overworked and underpaid employees, burning them out until they quit, further increasing the output expectations on the dwindling workforce that remains. This is exacerbated, they said, by a refusal to act to modernize the agency’s workflows or provide workplace flexibilities that have become the norm not just in the private sector, but elsewhere in the federal government. ...

According to a survey of union members commissioned by AFGE Council 220, 43% of respondents reported that they were planning to leave the agency within the next 12 months, including 26% of respondents who said they were strongly considering it. And 76% of respondents said that the volume of their workload is an impairment to their ability to perform their duties. ...

Union Seeks Additional Funding For SSA

     From Federal News Network:

Social Security Administration employees are back in the office, but understaffing and a restrictive telework policy are making them less productive, according to one of its unions, and may lead to an exodus of more employees.

The American Federation of Government Employees Council 220, which represents SSA employees who work in field offices and teleservice centers, is asking Congress for $16.5 billion in “emergency funding” to support SSA for the rest of fiscal 2023. ...

Sherry Jackson, AFGE Council 220’s second vice president and legislative action coordinator, said during a virtual town hall Thursday that SSA is running with 4,000 fewer field office and teleservice center employees than it did 12 years ago. ...

The emergency funding request amounts to a $1.7 billion increase above the Biden administration’s fiscal 2023 budget request for SSA. Congress passed a continuing resolution that lasts through Dec. 16 and is still working out a comprehensive spending deal for the rest of FY 2023. ...

Elections Have Consequences

     From Government Executive:

The Social Security Administration has plans to restore a few key parts of its national agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees.

After months of ongoing discussions, SSA and AFGE reached an agreement on July 25 to reinstate previous levels of official time for union activity, and the union’s use of SSA facilities, that existed in an earlier iteration of the national contract from 2012. ...

And, there are more negotiations still on the table — SSA and AFGE have agreed to reopen six other contract articles, Couture said. The SSA spokesperson added that the agency looks forward to partnering with AFGE in the upcoming contract negotiations, in part, to try to resolve ongoing challenges with staffing and employee satisfaction. ...

    Actually, AFGE shouldn't need an election win to get this sort of thing. The problem is that the Republican Party has gone nuts in many ways and one of them is its strident hostility towards federal employee  unions. I know the union can be a pain in the neck. I know it can make impossible demands. I know that it is little concerned with service to the public but the Trump Administration policies towards federal employee unions were over the top by almost any standard.

Support For Allowing NHC ALJs To Unionize

    From Government Executive:

A group of Democratic senators have revisited a long-dormant effort to broaden the bargaining unit of administrative law judges at the Social Security Administration, buoyed by recent guidance from the Biden administration aimed at encouraging collective bargaining at federal agencies.

In 2007, then-Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue created the agency’s National Hearing Center, a cadre of administrative law judges who would parachute into regions with a long backlog of disability claims, but he left the component’s employees outside of the ALJ bargaining unit at the Office of Hearing Operations, which is represented by the Association of Administrative Law Judges.

In 2011, the Federal Labor Relations Authority sided with Astrue, finding that although National Hearing Center judges had nearly identical job duties, they were management officials because they supervised decision writers. That said, the FLRA also found that the agency committed unfair labor practices by exhibiting hostility toward the union and failing to notify the group of the component’s creation.

In a letter to Acting Social Security Commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi last month, five Democratic senators, led by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, urged the agency to consider classifying judges in the National Hearing Center as bargaining unit employees and granting them access to the Association of Administrative Law Judges. They cited the fact that in the years since the FLRA’s decision, the differences in the responsibilities of ALJs in both agency components have disappeared. ...

    Bad grammar in that first sentence! Tut, tut, tut

Union Committed To Work From Home

      From Government Executive:

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.

AFGE And Social Security In Contentious Relationship

      From the Washington Post: 

 … AFGE leaders criticized officials [at Social Security] for continuing to act like Trump’s anti-union edicts remain in effect, despite Biden’s policies to the contrary.

“You still have those holdovers from the previous administration,” Kelley told reporters, “that just don't want to give up any form of authority.”

Social Security officials continue to pursue an “aggressive anti-union/anti-employee bargaining approach … undoubtedly directed by the Trump orders,” said an email from Rich Couture, AFGE’s spokesman on Social Security.

Among the current Social Security polices Couture cited as “antithetical” to Biden’s agenda are “draconian official time cuts” and the “elimination and reduction of union office space nationwide, which similarly limits our ability to represent and access employees, especially now with reentry at agency installations now starting.” Official time allows union leaders to represent workers in limited ways, such as grievance procedures, while on government time.

A Social Security statement said it “complied with all of the administration’s labor policies and is fully committed to positive relations with our labor partners. Last year, we offered to renegotiate major provisions of our collective bargaining agreements with all three of our unions. Two of our unions accepted and we are currently in contract negotiations with them. AFGE did not accept that offer and is pursuing arbitration to revoke the entire 2019 contract.” …

Preach!

    From a piece by Nancy Altman, the president of Social Security Works, in The Hill (emphasis added):

After two long years, Social Security offices are scheduled to reopen in early April.  

It was wrong to keep them closed (to all but those deemed to be in dire need) for so long. Post offices never closed. ...

During the two years of closed offices, claims for disability benefits plummeted, at a time when they should have skyrocketed, given the pandemic. ...

But the reopening may be rocky — or worse. There may be very long lines; there may be people who wait and wait but are not served. People may be forced to wait outside in the rain. If things go horribly wrong, there could even be violence, committed by people who are desperate. ...

The Social Security Administration (“SSA”) should have started planning for reopening the day the offices were closed. But unfortunately, the commissioner at the time was a Donald Trump crony, Andrew Saul, who was only too happy to work from home himself, even before the pandemic.

Ralph de Juliis, head of the union council representing field office workers, also contributed to the two years of closed offices. Shockingly, he has publicly advocated for permanently shuttering almost all of the more than 1200 field offices. ...

Congress has starved SSA — and continues to do so.The Omnibus funding bill recently passed by Congress drastically underfunds SSA ....

This is part of a long pattern of Congress underfunding SSA, which began years before the pandemic. Between 2010 and 2021, SSA’s operating budget fell by 13 percent. During the same period, the number of beneficiaries grew by 21 percent due largely to the (still ongoing) retirement of the Baby Boom generation. ...

 For most of its history, SSA had a well-deserved reputation for providing exemplary service to the public. People went to their local field offices knowing they would get excellent, compassionate help with their earned benefits. It was considered one of the best federal agencies to work for, as well. Now, it ranks near the bottom. Training, which used to be extensive and first-rate, has reportedly deteriorated. ...

    You would expect that Altman would be sympathetic to de Juliis and the union. I think it's a sign of just how outrageous the union has become that Altman is criticizing him by name.

    It's not a good long term strategy for a labor union to lose support from the left since it will never have support from the right.

Michael Astrue Has Lots Of Criticism For Democrats And Unions

      From an interview on Federal News Network with former Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue:

... The sense that I generally had was, [Andrew Saul was] trying to quiet things down. There was no successor between our time and there was an acting, long-term acting who quite frankly, did a brutal job. And pretty much every significant service metric went backwards dramatically. I mean, we spent six years driving down the hearing backlog, which was considered a national scandal and was on CBS Evening News and all that kind of stuff. And we took it down very significantly. And then under Carolyn Colvin, it went back up faster than it went down. And a lot of the other significant measures of service in the public deteriorated very rapidly. So I think my sense of what Andrew was trying to do, was to try to stabilize the agency, at a time when they didn’t have a lot of money, wasn’t getting a lot of attention from the White House or the Congress, and just trying to get some sense of normalcy back to the agency. And that’s kind of my sense of what they were trying to do. ... 

Well, I think what’s disappointing is just this sense of neglect. You know, it’s been 14, 15 months now that they’ve had the time to decide what they wanted to do at Social Security [about a new Commissioner]. And they haven’t made a decision. And I think that demoralizing for the agency, it tends to freeze decision making. I think it’s hard to justify. You look at sort of how positions are filled in other agencies, and you say, well, how come not at Social Security, is it just not as important? It’s frustrating. And I agree with you, I believe that the acting commissioner is up any day. And there’s been no announcement on that. The concern is that they’re just going to do nothing. And although violation of the vacancy act often doesn’t bring the agency to its knees, it’s demoralizing for employees, it invalidates certain types of actions, or keeps the commissioner from doing certain types of things, and creates enormous uncertainty. And the last thing that the agency needs, with underfunding and everything else that’s going on is uncertainty. So it would be a very helpful thing for improving service delivery for the White House to decide what direction doesn’t want to go at Social Security and try to find the very best person that they can to run the agency. ...

[T]here’s a history and yet again, both parties, but particularly with the Democrats of nominating candidates [for Commissioner], without any management experience whatsoever, and to get it into an agency where you have 60,000 to 70,000 employees to manage, and you’ve got enormous budgetary issues, you’ve got workloads going through the roof, you have antiquated technology, you have lots and lots of problems. It is really almost unfair to throw someone in who’s managing people for the first time and whose background is policy because they don’t get to do policy. But they got to do a lot of management of a very complex organization. And it’s a tough one to learn on the job. ...

[Interviewer]: And how did you find dealing with the major unions, there, the AFGE councils?

Michael Astrue: Impossible. I mean, they’ve been confrontational since the ’60s, and not really, in my opinion, interested in improving service to the public. They’re interested in expanding the number of employees and that type of thing. And I found them excessively confrontational, dishonest, really, in reporting what was being said and done in the agency, and really very determined not to cooperate in a Republican administration. Now in Democratic administrations, they have what’s called partnership, and at Social Security, White Houses have pretty much interpreted that almost as co-management, which makes it very difficult to make change, and very difficult to improve service, which is why, under Carolyn Colvin, for instance, service went backwards in every conceivable way, because I don’t think she had division but she also had her hands tied by the union. And you worry in this administration, that it’s going to be back to the same thing where you can’t make the changes that you need to improve the quality of work unless the union approves them. ...

Does Anybody Care?

      I keep posting links to stories such as these from New York and California about terrible service at Social Security but I am getting an increasing feeling of futility. The national media seem uninterested. Congress just passed an appropriation for Social Security that was way below the increase in the cost of living, assuring that Social Security's service problems are just going to get worse. Poor public service at Social Security is just too boring a subject for a Congressional hearing. Agency management seems more interested in dealing with internal labor-management issues than with public service. Social Security basically didn't answer their telephones this week -- at all. They say it's technical problems but the agency couldn't be bothered to even put out a press release. How can a huge agency like Social Security fail to answer its phones for a whole week and no one notices other than those trying to call the agency? If agency management can get away with this, is there anything they can't get away with? Of course, it's hard to tell the difference between telephone service this week and most weeks because it's so bad even when they halfway try to answer their phones. What is it going to take to get public attention to the problems? Will it be noticed when people are lining up well before dawn to get into Social Security field offices to be helped? That's coming in April.

Contractor Problems Contributing To Social Security Phone Issues

    Social Security's telephone systems have been down this week. It's been essentially impossible to call in. I don't  get the impression that the agency is all that concerned about this. They haven't even put out a press release. Maybe by this point the difference between nearly impossible and impossible have become so slight that it hardly matters to them any more.

    There's an employee union podcast on reopening at Social Security, specifically at the teleservice centers, which says that there are MAJOR technical problems with new telecommunications contractors which are significantly affecting agency telephone service. There's a fair amount of whining on the podcast that would appeal only to union members but mixed in is real info on the agency's telephone problems. Talk about strategies to make sure agency employees can work in their pajamas everyday, forever, isn't going to win the union many friends nor are many likely to buy into the notion that Covid will still be a dire public health threat by late this month when agency employees start returning -- part-time -- to their offices. However, my point in posting this is the information in the podcast about the serious technical problems.

    Note that no matter how bad the contractor problems may be, Social Security lacks the manpower to answer its phones anyway!