A shut down government
by
Matt Giwer (c) 1996 <12/3>

      By some miracle, before you read this the government may be re-open and the mud-slinging will be regarding who flinched and who won. I have put off writing this for one reason. I want to ask you who is being harmed?
      Some government employees of course. The media finds them every day for the evening news. Some tourists of course and some others whose applications are not being processed.
      So lets look at the impact of the applications not being processed. Social security is a good example. But where are the people in need of social security who are not receiving it on the evening news?
      There is part of the answer to our essential government workers. It has not been a month yet and since the "normal" delay for our efficient government workers is nine to ten months it will be some time before anyone notices. And even with the delay, what is an extra month?
      Some of the government employees who are out there bleating "I am essential" are the ones who just can't seem to overcome the normal government backlog in processing. Perhaps I just have a good memory but when it comes to a backlog, every so often the media would cover a whistle-blower. I remember one reporting that she was ordered to goof off rather than work on the backlog as that was saved for overtime work.
      It would be interesting to juxtapose the "I am essential" with some whistle-blower stories. Now I agree it is difficult to estimate just what part of these delays is overwork and what is real. But let me start with one management truism; if the backlog is constant, it is not overwork.
      If the backlog grows every month then there is too much work for too little staff. There are of course motivation and overtime and other considerations but it has to be growing for there to be a problem. When the backlog is constant year in and year out it means the staff has set its own pace that has nothing to do with the workload.
      To some extent there are simply time consuming steps that have to be accomplished. As there are no shortcuts in Social Security it is difficult to estimate what the real time would be if the staff were not setting the pace.
      For a comparison we can look at getting a passport. Everyone who gets a passport goes through exactly the same process. However, if you need one for your job or have an emergency need, it takes five working days. The normal wait is on the order of three months.
      Excuse me, but that means that if the staff of the passport office were not setting its own leisurely pace everyone's passport would take one week. Since it is exactly the same process there is no reason all applications can not be handled in the same manner.
      It would appear by a similar ratio that social security applications could be qualified in about one month at most. But do not forget, these are the people who are "suffering" from the shutdown. They are essential to the delay they put into the work they do.
      Still the question remains should government employees not getting a paycheck govern policy on a balanced budget, bankrupting Medicare, and ending entitlements? AT&T just announced the first round of layoffs, 40,000 of them with many times more to be announced this year. Are we to be treated with stories of AT&T employees and demands that AT&T not lay them off?
      What is the difference? Why are government "layoffs" being politicized when private sector layoffs are not? The government has some 240,000 not receiving full pay or no pay. There were at least that many layoffs in the private sector last year from major corporations in downsizing alone. Certainly there were ten times as many people who found themselves looking for another job through no cause of their own.
      What is the difference here? Here we have people who were so secure in their jobs, average pay over $36,000 a year, that they not only set their own work pace but did not plan for being "laid off." And as for the rest of the people who can expect to be laid off their average income is a bit over $20,000 a year. Pardon me if I do not feel a great compassion for government employees making nearly twice the average with automatically better credit ratings due to job security having the normal problem of the average worker.
      Ah, but they are still employed and can not look for other work? Why can they not look for other work? If they really do not like what has happened to them they certainly should be looking for another job, one that is not a government job. But they seem to be sticking it out, don't they? It appears they have determined a missed paycheck is better than a non-government job.
      Regardless of the cause or the blame for this turn of events why is there sympathy for government employees in all of this? These are people who obviously can not get a better job than they have in the government else they would not be parading, they would be job hunting. These are the same government types who have justly earned our frustration at least when they are on the job.
      Yes, they are essential, because we can't take our business to another government. They are part of a monopoly upon access to things the government has declared are its monopoly. And they are the focus of our compassion because for the first time, they are suffering the consequences of their choice of employment.