There's a long and honored tradition of New York City employees with non-office jobs working only part of the day. My family's alarm system, for example, was put in during "working hours" over a several day period by a city employee, who always seemed to be able to arrive by 1 pm. A close relative who worked as a city health inspector started work at 9 and was usually home for lunch.
After all, why would an employee accept government wages if he actually had to work a full day? Because of the extraordinary pensions NYC retirees receive? Please! If he wanted to work hard, he would have become an investment banker! I'm outraged that New York City is now actually trying to keep track of its workers during working hours. The dreams of thousands of New York City youths, who strive for the elusive "City job," are being shattered.
UPDATE: Next thing you know, deans are going to start harassing tenured law professors who haven't written anything in years!
More embarassing than people who double-dip and steal from the government ... are those who pay and encourage such theft. Shame on you DB for not being embarrassed enough to print of your money-savings here.
And no, this is not what the rest of us with family values mean, urging more time spent with family. Sure you get ahead, at what price your dignity? Be careful what you brag on
A close relative who worked as a city health inspector started work at 9 and was usually home for lunch.
The problem is that the rest of the taxpayers in NYC (or wherever) are the ones paying the tab, and getting the city job is most often due to (often family) connections. So, you have businesses fleeing that city because of high taxes, and the jobs those taxes pay for being staffed part time for full time pay by nepotism, patronage, etc. Cities in general, and NYC in particular, are becoming ever more expensive to live, and for what? No wonder so many people want to flee to the suburbs where they hopefully get more for their tax money in the way of police, schools, etc.
Think of the Big Picture. You were probably paying a guy less, on the side, for him to work privately. When it became clear he was double-dipping, you remained silent and presumably paid him for the services procured on city time. Yep, that's encouraging theft. It encourages them to practice their business on taxpayer dime by effectively enabling the practice. Wink and nod and I got mine. The world keeps spinning, but you lose something in the long run. Character, class, conscience generally. At least that how it looks from a higher perch.
And who will you complain to if the work was done shoddy? No thanks. Sometimes better to pay full price.
We would be in the office for maybe an hour in the morning, doing paperwork, etc., and then be off on our own for the rest of the day, roaming the city to audit our target businesses. One nice bene was that we could get our parking tickets fixed, since we could invariably argue they were incurred doing city business.
In the end, I was let go at the end of the probation period. The problem was that the average production in the office was slightly over one case a day. Within a month or two, I was turning in maybe three cases a day. I figured they were the easy ones, but now figure that I got sacked because I was showing up everyone else and hadn't caught on to the trick, that you only do one audit a day, and then go do whatever.
Looking back, I could probably be nearing retirement if I hadn't rocked the boat. Nice pension, etc., as I practice patent law on the side.
See this for example
Right, they earn it...Pffffff....
As a policy matter, an employer should be required to inform an employee if the employer plans to track the employee's movements outside of working hours.
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sarcasm"> sarcasm</a>
And David, how's that article coming along.
Never forget the old addage: Sacred cows make the best hamburgers."
Lol PatHMV. Talk to DB about that.
No, I'm with the Stop Snitchin online campaign.
Don't brag about your cost savings, and dis the workers who put in a full shift though. I meant if it were me, I'd question whether the guy was double dipping and call off the transaction if he were.
Not participating is not the same as narcing someone out. Then or later, online.
My sister once quit a job because there was too little work: as I recall, she was supposed to be helping figure out why "the train of the future" had fallen off the tracks on its first run, but she found that showing up an hour late, leaving an hour early, taking a two-hour lunch, and reading both city papers through still left her bored to tears, so she quit.
Come to think of it, I've quit a couple of jobs for the same reason. Many years ago, I had a 2-hour morning shift at a coffee shop on-campus at the University of Chicago. I could just handle the work of fetching sandwiches, pouring coffee, making change, and so on, by working very fast and taking no breaks: that made the 2 hours seem like less than one. Then I was given a colleague. That made the 2 hours seem like 4, since we were busy enough not to be able to get any reading done, but not busy enough to avoid frequent short stretches of complete and boring inactivity. The fact that I'd caught my colleague doing some very shifty things (not quite shoplifting, but close) at a previous job in a record store didn't exactly help.
Tread carefully when there is srcasm about.
My boss had a little card in his pocket listing federal salaries by GS-level and years of service. He calculated that our highest-paid employee -- the systems analyst that designed an accounts payable system with (as I recall) 100,000 lines of code, and also supervised the 4 coders, was the only one making more money than the lowest-paid federal employee in the department, whose job was to sit in the printer room reading novels all day and making sure no one stole any of the printers.
Are all government employees useless drones? No, but a lot are. Civil Service rules are like university tenure: they protect the competent and energetic and those who are neither, so you get a lot of dead wood. Are all jobs like that? No. Ever notice that all the complaints about horrible teachers that can't be fired come from (a) colleges and universities or (b) public high schools? Private high-school teachers can be fired at will, which is good for the schools and good for the more competent teachers -- easier for the cream to rise when there's no dead wood in the way (sorry about the mixed metaphor!).
Police, firefighters and EMT's are a such a notable exception to the type of governement work DB is talking about that it hardly needed to be mentioned. It'd be near impossible for them to moonlight while working their regular jobs as opposed to a health inspector or file clerk.
Oh of course. Nobody was suggesting any generalizations at all about public employees above. You agree with me that this would be unfair, correct?
Shhhh... the UCLA fellas are sleeping in again.
Happy Labor Day everyone, from DB.
And oh, tenure! Makes labor union like the height of corporate capitalism
In 1983 or so I worked with a couple of long-time DOD bureaucrats who had taken early retirement to work in a private company that did contract work for the government. As Glenn or Elmer (I forget which) put it, the thing about government jobs is that half the population has enough self-respect to work just about as hard when they can't be fired as they would if they could. The other half will do as little work as possible, which in some (many?) government jobs is zero or close to it. I have personally seen a GAO employee who did no work whatsoever. He was paid as a computer programmer, but didn't know the computer language used in that department, he could not be forced to learn it. He read the newspaper all day. (This was before the web.) The only thing his boss could do to punish him was give him a non-window cubicle and give one of us non-GAO employees his window cubicle. (Normally GAO employees had first dibs.) He used to come around to mine once a day and ask if he could look out the window for 5 minutes. It took his boss two years of devious manipulation before she managed to shuffle him off to a supposedly better but actually worse job in another department across town. I heard he quit then.
Of course, the ratio of workers to non-workers in government jobs may not actually be 50-50, but the basic point seems true. As Glenn or Elmer also said, the ones who do the work are the ones who write to newspapers (and now blogs, I would add) to complain about the reputation that the ones who do little or no work have earned for both.
Of course, the work was easy and I finished all of mine by the 15th. My boss said we couldn't give Engineering their reports early because they would expect them early each month.
So I learned 2 hours lunches, yak extensively while I'm "working" and take longer breaks. I hated that internship.
Technically, I'm a government employee myself now, since I just started teaching at a charter school. However, the fact that it's a charter school means that my principal could have fired me yesterday half-way through the class he was sitting in on, if he'd thought that my performance was that bad. I think all government jobs should be like mine, I don't think much of unions in any field, and I believe that tenure should be abolished. Does that mean that I'm calling Prof. Volokh or any of the other professors on this site lazy? Certainly not. But I could certainly give dozens of examples of professors I've known who should be fired for laziness or incompetence or both, and no doubt would be if they didn't have tenure. (I've known one who didn't bathe more than once a week, though they did manage to push him into early retirement.)
Try to address my actual arguments.
because in private business if you are efficient, you make greater profit. and in many private companies, the employee who spearheads the efficiencies gets profit sharing, raise, etc.
in govt. (like my employment in law enforcement), being more efficient means that you just get a smaller budget since you have proved you can do more with less (personnel and time). so, what's the incentive? there is little to none.
in a private company, if i work better/more/more efficiently, i can get REAL benefits from that - stock options, profit sharing, raise, etc.
i can be twice as efficient and twice as good as another cop in my agency, but we still get the EXACT same pay.
not to mention that more efficiency and more suspect (and to a lesser extent) citizen contacts means greater civil liability and greater risk of injury.
study after study, for example has shown that physically fit officers are less likely to get injured, less likely to use excessive force, less likely to take sick leave, less likely to receive complaints, less likely to commit suicide, etc.
yet, my union has fought ANY sort of program wherein my agency could incentivize fitness by giving pay premium for passing a physical fitness standard.
i love my union, but like ALL unions, they are advocacy groups. their job is not to advocate for the greater good, or even for the greater good for those of their members who deserve extra. their job is to advocate for ALL their members, and to keep the mediocre on a relatively level field with the superior and the inferiro.
that's the reality of govt. work. i hardly think that police work should be privatized, but i am a realist and i realize that govt. has disincentives to be efficient and hardworking, and unions further hinder those goals
The problem of public employment has been kicked around since at least Max Webers time. And the dilemma is this: a tenure system for public servants insulates them from political pressure; yet, a tenure system also serves to protect those that don't work--I suggest the issue may lie with some of the countries more powerful unions: AFGE/AFSCME and their local counterparts. I would welcome any moves that could make firing incompetent/lazy employees easier--but that is a very difficult task, and frankly, given the power of the public sector unions, I predict congress isnt going to wrestle this issue to the floor.
Capitalism and unions both have their dark sides.
I will grant that I shouldn't have said that "possibly most" government employees are "useless drones": that was an exaggeration. However, even 10% or 20% or 30% is an awful lot of people, and an awful lot of wasted taxpayer dollars.
From wide experience in academic and non-academic jobs, I can estimate that the percentage of university professors I've known who would not be missed at all if they left — as in, there wouldn't even be much work for others to cover — is 10-12%, while another 25-30% are covering their classes with adequate competence, but not much more than that. Perhaps I've been unlucky. The GAO was far worse. I've worked for six different private firms in the tech industry, and four different private or charter high schools, and none of them had more than 5% grossly lazy or incompetent, and that 5% didn't tend to make it to the end of the year.
Or a faculty position as a law professor....ZING!
I don't think there is much evidence supporting the notion that government workers, union workers, or unionized government workers have significantly more of the negative characteristics than, say, private sector workers, or private sector non-union workers.
And I only make the posts that I do because for some reason, on conservative/libertarian blogs, you tend to see at least implications that government and/or union employees are systemically worse. It's not true. That doesn't mean DB's post doesn't reflect a real problem. But you know, there are private sector lawyers who double bill for their work. . . .
Having said that, the typical experience here is "feast or famine." Sometimes it is extremely busy, and then other times there is little to do. The work comes in waves. But it is also unpredictable, so it is necessay for people to be around, and we thus get paid for our availability.
1. The employee was not informed that his movements could/would be tracked. Encouraging compliance by letting people know that they'll be caught is much more productive than taking a punitive approach.
2. The earliest the employee was ever found leaving was two hours early. But they also found that some days he came in two hours earlier in the morning. It doesn't say whether or not those figures balanced out; without knowing that, it's impossible to know whether or not the firing is actually fair. At a minimum, this casts a different light than the 'lazy government employee' conclusion that people are jumping to.
And finally, the employee wasn't 21 years old; he had been employed for 21 years.
The earliest the employee was ever found leaving was two hours early.
Not exactly. He was found at home 110 minutes before his shift was supposed to be over.
But they also found that some days he came in two hours earlier in the morning. It doesn't say whether or not those figures balanced out; without knowing that, it's impossible to know whether or not the firing is actually fair. At a minimum, this casts a different light than the 'lazy government employee' conclusion that people are jumping to.
Yes, I noticed that. But the article also says that he had been forging his clock-out punches. His early arrivals would "balance out" only if, when he arrived at 6 a.m. for an 8 a.m. shift, he waited to punch in until 8 while working an unclocked two hours. Possible, but not likely IMO.
See this for example
Right, they earn it...Pffffff....
At least their not fleecing the taxpayer for it. The unsuspecting client, maybe, but caveat emptor.
If they finish in less than a full day, they can go home.
The guys on my route start at dawn (around 5:30-5:45) and are usually through by 7:30.
Works out to around $70/hr
On the other hand, my wife works for the county in a laboratory that has to be covered 365 days a year, with a staff of 3. She gets a lot of OT, all earned and then some
Who represents the taxpayer, who is paying at least double the taxes necessary to run the state or federal government? ...Anyone?
And to add insult to injury, politicians always have their hand out for more, more, more!!
Since then, the county has started going to automated collection, but the uku pau guys cannot be dismissed. We have to wait for them to die.
(My wife is in the Hawaii Government Employees Union, which is not quite as sordid as UPW or the elected officials.)
So Mr. Halpin very well might have worked more than required, but since he worked 6-1 instead of 8-3 he's somehow loafing.
Without seeing more complete records, there's no way of judging whether Halpin did more than required, less than required, or as much as required.
This is one inefficiency of some government (and many private) offices--you can do all the work even more work than you're required to do (and do it better than required), but you are only judged by whether your butt is in a chair during the specified hours.
And for those who think that private organizations are run all that much better, how many of you posted from work? And was it a government or a private office that continues to inspire Dilbert?
Note also that being at a job site doesn't necessarily mean that you're working, while being at home (if your work is site-specific as Halpin's was) pretty well guarantees that you aren't.
I agree that more info would make it clearer what was going on here, but if he was putting in the time, just not the specific hours scheduled, it is hard to see why he would go to the trouble of faking his timecard. And bear in mind that his job was supervising carpenters, a job that can't be performed unless the workers under his supervision are present. If their shifts, by hypothesis, started at 8, what work would he be doing at 6? And who was supervising them after he took off?
I don't know what it's like for a government agency, but I used to work for a construction company, and I can tell you that supervising carpenters involves a lot more than just watching them work. There's timecard management, expense reports, supply orders, and just generally lots of adminstrative work that goes into it. And if you have good workers that you trust, you don't have to watch them every minute. You can assign jobs and just check back in periodically. I don't know if that's what he was doing, but to say that he couldn't possibly perform any aspect of his job without all his guys there shows stunning ignorance of how the world works. And is kind of condescending.
Yes, of course supervision involves more than watching other people work. I overstated; sorry. But if you have a supervisory position in which you're required to be on-site at certain hours, it stands to reason that it's because your job involves, among other things, supervising the actual construction as it happens, yes?
I still say that Halpin would not have been faking his own timecard ("timecard management"?) unless what he was really doing would've gotten him in trouble. I don't see why that should be so if he was putting in the hours and the supervision expected of him.
And leaving early 83 times over a five-month period? I don't know about your experience, but that would be way past dismissal-level misbehavior in every hourly job I've worked.
It depends, did he arrive early more than 83 times? We need the figures to decide whether he was stealing time from the city or whether the city was stealing time from him. If getting his work done requires him to be in by 6, but the city doesn't want to start paying him until 8, then the city is stealing time from him.
As to specific hours, you come back to my point. Halpin should be judged by how well he gets his work done. Judging any professional employee by butt-in-chair time is just plain stupid. It demonstrates the incompetence of the people who are supervising and investigating Halpin.
Of course, a more careful analysis could make Halpin appear worse. But the article doesn't prove that he was paid for more hours than he worked.
Most of the "government employees are lazy" carping appears to be from people who have never worked in the public sector and frankly, work off cliches rather than reality.
My experience is that most government workers work hard. Does that there aren't any lazy employees? Of course not. But most here do their job to the best of their ability in a timely manner.
Oh, and yes, I sometimes do post on government time. But I also work for a salary and I do not get overtime or even comp time--so I do not feel the least bit guilty about doing so as long as I fully do my assignments, which come first.
This is a key point. Notice that the article didn't criticize Helpin for failing to get his work done or doing his work poorly. It criticized him for starting at 6:00 and leaving at 1:00 instead of starting at 8:00 and leaving at 3:00. (Those hours do sound really sweet, but that's a different question.)
The failure of many government middle managers (and of many journalists covering government, and of snark professor-bloggers) is that they frequently do not try to measure what a government employee actually gets done.
Butt-in-chair time is not a very good measurement of actual productivity. Were the projects that Helpin supervised done well, done efficiently, and done on time? That's the true measure of his work.
Once again, a closer look might help or hurt Helpin, but the article didn't prove that he was cheating the city.
i've spent a good part of my life in the public sector...
lifeguard, firefighter and cop
i don't know about "most", but i would argue a much greater %age are lazy than the private sector - because, in general, there are disincentives in many respects to working harder and especially to working more efficiently.
see my above post for the reasons why. part has to do with unions, and part has to do with the nature of public (and especially civil) service jobs.
I see this in hospitals too and it's a root problem. I don't know how lousy incentive structures are justified.
This particular case I bet that guy was just trying to make his commute easier.
Bosses can't hire because of the ubiquitous bureaucratic red tape and because HR imposes a host of obsolete, irrelevant, and inflexible requirements that prevent excellent candidates from qualifying for jobs. Bosses can't fire because it's impossible to prove low-level incompetence and laziness to the satisfaction of HR and the red tape will strangle you. Employees don't get rewarded for good performance - they just get the same step increases everyone else gets. Promotions are a nightmare because it doesn't matter how good you are - if you haven't put in the time or satisfied the irrelevant requirements, you're not getting promoted. Many agencies still give zero flexibility to their workers in terms of telework, etc. - it doesn't matter if the work gets done as long as your butt is in that chair 7.33 hours per day. The real stellar workers either quit in frustration, decide to stop being stellar workers, and/or become bitter.
This isn't to say that most government workers don't work as hard as most private sector workers. But government probably has a smaller percentage of really stellar workers and a larger percentage of duds populating the civil service ranks.
There are incentives for higher level employees however and because I qualify as a professional worker their are performance based raises and promotions. There are also occasional firings of management level employees where I work because of competence issues. With non-professionals workers it is very hard to fire them after they make it through their first 6 months and there are no performance based rewards or penalties besides having your boss mad or happy with you.
a cop gets the exact same pay for doing the bare minimum (responding to 911 calls and only making arrests when mandated by law (usually pretty much just domestic violence crimes) than by seeking out DUI's (which always involve drunk jerks who want to sue, make complaints, resist arrest, etc.), drug dealers, etc.
simply put, every extra citizen contact, ESPECIALLY with people you are pat-frisking, searching, detaining, arresting, etc. exposes one to extra chances of being injured, sued, disciplined, having false complaints lodged against one, etc.
and i say this as somebody who in 20 years has never had a IIU beef (which is considerably attributable to luck and having a way of talking to people that tends to put them at ease. even a cop acting PERFECTLY will often get complaints just because people like to lie and lay blame elsewhere) - depolicing is a reality.
many unions (including my own) have also established that the only thing the dept can REQUIRE an officer in patrol to do is to respond to 911 calls. they can't be disciplined for what they don't do.
i know officers from several agencies who have worked midnight shift for YEARS without a single DUI. their philosophy is why expose themselves to reams of paperwork, liability, complaints, etc. etc. for a DUI?
this is disgusting and sad, but it is not unusual at all.
This is all too rare. What I see is elected officials putting their friends in high-level, high-paying positions, and then freezing non-union pay. If you think step increases decrease incentives, try no step increases.
Both my managers and I know that they can't replace someone who can do what I can do for what they pay me. They can't give me raises, so I get a lot of flexibility instead. And that includes flexibility as to hours and workload. This flexibility includes the right to come in late and leave early as I want, as long as 1) I tell folks when I'm not in the office, 2) I put in enough total hours each pay period, and 3) I get my work done.
And yes, I jealously guard my flexibility. It's part of my compensation.
I've been ordered to reduce 10% of my people several times. Once it was 50%. Subsequently, I've also ordered it a few times. That's a major difference between the two environments. (And it really has a motivating effect on the survivors.)
Workforce cut by a mere 10%? Wow, whose private sector cuts really are mild.
I live under a system of supposed "merit raises," but in practice, tha means that non-union employees get what's left (if anything) after negotiated union raises are paid. I agree that government service needs a real merit raise system, but for a merit raise system to work, government actually has to give merit raises to employees who earn them.
UPDATE: Would law professors want tenure decisions to be made by how one stamps the time clock rather than the amount of work one does or its results?
It's one thing to be a stickler for rules, but a good boss sometimes has to worry about whether things are getting done, not just about whether rules are being kept.
For all we know, showing at 6 may have been necessary to get things done and in the taxpayers' interest. For example, for a worker who travels to location on the city's clock, showing up at 8 might have meant spending hours more in traffic per week with the taxpayer's meter running compared to showing up at 6. One can easily think of legitimate reasons for showing up at 6 rather than 8 there is no reason to assume lazinesss is one of them. Nothing in the article enables me to make a judgment that something wrong was occurring.
You discount the frequency of the cuts, and the employee base to which they are applied. If the company is being efficiently run, the growth of excess labor is not very great, so a 10% cut every few years can keep the workforce in line with the business needs. This periodically gets rid of the non-performing labor that continues unchecked in the public sector.
But, even if 10% is mild, when have we seen it applied to the public workforce? Would you favor such a cut to weed out the non-performing public labor? I would expect the set of hard working and productive government employees to rejoice at the prospect of getting rid of the deadwood that makes their jobs harder and tarnishes all public employees.
The office I work in makes matters worse. When we do a good, efficient job, it becomes harder for the government to put people in prison and keep them there. Winning a new trial for someone convicted of child molestation or getting a murderer out on parole doesn't exactly make elected officials (who control the budget) want to reward you.
Nobody is forced to be a customer of that law firm. I am forced to pay taxes to support government agencies.
In fact, if I understand how law firms operate, the only ones that pay for goofing off at the office are the senior partners - to the extent that they may have to pay salary for non-billable hours. If that time was billed, it's fraud.
You choose to live and work where you do. If you don't like the tax structure, vote with your feet.
We all have items we'd like to take out of the budget, so we hold elections to decide who gets to decide. In many local governments, we even hold direct elections on tax and spending matters. But one of the bummers of living in a democracy is that you don't always get 51% to support your view.
Your comment reminds me of people who don't like their homeowners' association. They chose to live where they live, and with that choice, they chose their governing structure.
Of course, government workers like me who think we're undercompensated can find other work. But we can also negotiate for alternative compensation--like the flexibility to start and end work two hours earlier than our employers might prefer.
Or, of course, you could skip the "negotiation" part and just forge the punches on your timecard . . .
But if the city was getting 5 hours of work when it was paying for 7, that's a big deal. Again, the article doesn't tell us.