Good for them!
Working without pay is completely nonsensical. The relationship between the employee and employer has been broken.
If I were in some of these guys shoes I'd be working odd jobs to make ends meet.
Working without pay is completely nonsensical. The relationship between the employee and employer has been broken.
If I were in some of these guys shoes I'd be working odd jobs to make ends meet.
At least some are already doing this.
Civil service rules are quite troubling. I can see the idea that it shouldn't be easy to make everything political, but the problem is that this goes only one way. If the president's predecessor hired a few million hostile partisans, what is he supposed to do? Is he just supposed to continue down that path, hiring tens of millions of his own partisans in order to win back control? Maybe the next president can hire a hundred million people, and then we're one president away from the entire population working for the federal government. There needs to be a reasonable way to toss out the partisan troublemakers who are undermining the will of the voters.
Another troubling rule is that layoffs must be done according to seniority and veteran status, not performance. Performance is considered last! This is an absurdity; you couldn't run a normal non-monopoly software firm that way. The only reliable way to eliminate low-performing employees is to eliminate everybody in a given agency.
No, it doesn't, there are rules protecting against patronage hires to civil service positions; they aren't perfect, but the protections aren't one sided.
> If the president's predecessor hired a few million hostile partisans
Not gonna happen, since it would take not only an unprecedented politicization of hiring but also a President getting to fill half the current federal workforce.
> Is he just supposed to continue down that path, hiring tens of millions of his own partisans in order to win back control?
Uh, no, the President is not supposed to have partisan control of the federal civil service workforce.
> There needs to be a reasonable way to toss out the partisan troublemakers who are undermining the will of the voters.
If they aren't doing their legal duty competently, federal civil service workers can be fired for cause. Not being a partisan of the President, isn't cause, and that's a feature not a bug.
> Another troubling rule is that layoffs must be done according to seniority and veteran status, not performance.
I don't see that as troubling at all.
> The only reliable way to eliminate low-performing employees is to eliminate everybody in a given agency.
No, the reliable way is to set performance standards at the appropriate floor and then fire people who don't meet them for cause; civil service rules do allow for performance standards and do allow firing people who don't meet them. You know the practice of PIPs in private employment? That's directly modelled on what is required for performance-based termination in civil service employment.
Layoffs fill a different purpose.
[Edit: No long as clear cut. Now both parties are voting against each other's ending bills.
A fair few people don't have a lot of savings, as in will end up with no cash at all if they're not paid.
Even if you wanted to keep working for deferred pay, if you're in that situation you'd need to do something quite soon.
I suppose modern day loansharks are also having a great time.
If the employees are currently paycheck to paycheck, and even considering a loan then chances are they would not be eligible for a loan.
>Trump, Congress Reach Tentative Deal to Reopen Government for Three Weeks
I’m not even in the US, but my inbox has been flooded with emails from various financial institutions offering interest-free loans to government workers.
Here is a question: How can al lthe employees of the IRS for a collective to say "fuck the IRS - here is a new way of doing things based on our inside knowledge"
Now - you may say "well thats a stupid thing to imagine"
But lets take it to the private sector: Imagine that Facebook stopped paying its employees - they have 1.5 billion customers to handle...
Don't you think the employees couldn't just walk away and say "let start a new thing based on the information we collectively know"
Certainly they could - but I imagine the average FB salary is much higher than the collective IRS salary...
but still - if you wanted to affect change in the world for decades to come - it could come from a giant group of IRS employees doing something that disrupts the opacity of taxes. (Fuck you H&R Block, BTW)
Sure, they could make something that would compete with Intuit and H&R Block, etc, but it wouldn't be the IRS, and we would still need the IRS.
Pascal, as a teen, essentially invented the calculator (albeit a very slow version) for his father; the device was called a Pascaline [0], and he built it because his father was a "tax collector" in 17th century France.
In those days, tax collector meant that you would buy the right to collect 'x' in government taxes (and keep for yourself), for 'x - $discount', where $discount was the balance of 1) what the government believed was worth them avoiding collection themselves, 2) what the tax collector believed they could still reasonably profit from the difference of.