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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

- "The firings targeted probationary employees, who have fewer job protections than permanent employees, but still must be fired for cause. Some probationary staff are new to the agency, while others recently promoted or transferred positions. Additionally, all "intermittent experts" — temporary employees hired at-will often for specific subject matter expertise — were terminated."

There's no pretense of firing anyone other than "the subgroup of federal employees that are technically easiest to fire". Firing everyone who was recently promoted (for one category) is objectively a very absurd selector.

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Very clear that they don't actually care about fraud, waste, etc. This is all about reducing the budget through employment cuts.

That fact is VERY apparent because there's been more than a couple of times where OMB has scrambled to rehire recently fired employees.

This is a haphazard mess that will cripple the government and likely the US economy for a decade or more.

That is the plan and it is working.

Specifically, the plutocratic class wants an employment recession. Disciplining labor, and getting to drop interest rates both increase their grasp on the world.

>but still must be fired for cause.

For all of the talk about "fraud" this is exactly that. All of these thousands of people are being told that they're being let go for "performance reasons" in clearly template emails which is just false. I've been reading stories people are posting about receiving these severance emails in shock because they'd just been praised for their performance, or showing them to their bosses who are also shocked because the bosses weren't informed at all and had no issues with the employee.

There are going to be endless lawsuits about this. The expense and waste of time is going to be enormous. But it achieves their real goal of crippling these agencies and reducing oversight for businesses.

Swamping courts with cases is a stated goal. Its's a DOS attack.

all these probationary firings, across all departments, will impact succession planning in few years. the whole reason to have 'new' people, is to keep an organization functional.

working somewhere that has no new people, is not fun when all the old people with knowledge all retire at once.

It's not just the new people though. There are people with 25 years of experience at an agency who are being fired because they had a promotion within the last 12 months which means they are technically still "probationary" in their role.

The loss of institutional knowledge right now is devastating.

This is the nature of union employment: seniority >> everything else.

Nonsense.

This tired trope fails to capture the accelerationism at play. Elon is firing the most ambitious people in government. 8 years in one position, 1 year promoted fired over the person 9 years in one position.

This is not the nature of union employment, it is a structural weakness in the way employment has been negotiated. Musk is exploiting that weakness.

> This is the nature of union employment: seniority >> everything else.

Actors, writers, and directors are in unions in Hollywood, and the seniority plays no part in who gets which part or which crew is hired for a production.

Seniority has often been used in factories because it was easy metric where you had 'interchangeable' people doing the labour: the people were treated almost like machines/widgets themselves. But the advantage of seniority in that context was that it helped stability: you stayed at the same company so it reduced retraining / rehiring costs to the company, and in exchange for your loyalty to the company, the company was loyal to folks that didn't jump around constantly looking for greener pastures.

But there is nothing inherit in being unionized that mandates the use of seniority as a metric.

You are mistaken about the bodies of law in play here.

Probationary status for federal public sector workers has nothing to do with unions in the federal public sector.

Federal public sector unions do not even have a legal right to bargain over this topic.

For more on civil service protections and the category of "probationary employee" see:

https://www.mspb.gov/appeals/infosheets/Probationary_Employe...

Exactly. They are so junior they aren't even protected yet. This is still a side-effect of unionization, from my POV.

It has nothing to do with unions in this case.

It's generally accepted that a professional civil service is superior to a spoils system. That it's better to have a civil service that promotes people based on merit and retains experience from administration to administration, than a system where most key people are political appointees serving the current administration.

A professional civil service sometimes comes into conflict with the political component of the executive branch. Because of that, civil servants need stronger employment protections than ordinary employees. For example, the administration should not be able to fire a career civil servant for politically motivated reasons and replace them with a loyalist.

But hiring obviously goes wrong from time to time. A probationary period with a lower bar for firing is a compromise that makes hiring mistakes less costly if they are detected early.

This policy is not the product of unionization. Blaming unions for it makes as much sense as blaming the phases of the moon for it.

Further, "probationary" and "junior" are not the same thing. People who have recently been promoted or changed roles are in this category, even if they've been working for the federal government for decades and decades.

Once you're past your probationary period, you are likely protected by a union. Therefore it is a side-effect of unionization that these junior-est of employees are the easiest pickings.

Agree that the term "junior" here has some nuance to it, though.

"Once you're past your probationary period, you are likely protected by a union."

Employees can join a union at any time federal public sector, including during a probationary period.

"Therefore it is a side-effect of unionization that these junior-est of employees are the easiest pickings."

Your premise is false, but even if it weren't, this wouldn't follow.

So they might be in the union, but not protected by it yet. Again, "new" or "junior" enough that the admin would rather go after them than "regular" employees.

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