FatCratz

You're Fired! European edition...

How hard is it to fire a FatCrat? That's one of our perennial questions, and we've come up with some excellent examples from inside the beltway. However, by personal experience, I know that Europe still has us beat in the bureaucratic job security department. Maybe we're headed in this direction.

Here's an illustration from one of our faithful expat readers in Germany:

I recently heard of a colleague who was a lecturer in a German University (like a professorship, but lacking some of the rights and responsibilities). The important point is that in the German system this person is a state official, effectively a bureaucrat with a PhD (or  the German equivalent). Despite the fact that she refused to offer classes or hold lectures, she continued to receive compensation. She could only be fired for "gross negligence," but gross negligence doesn't include failing to teach classes.

In this instance, the bureaucrat/lecturer was finally fired, showing what it takes to get fired as a German state employee--stop living in Germany.

How Hard is it to Fire a Federal Employee? III

The Federal Diary in the Post today details the case of Bob Whitmore, a 37-year Labor Department employee, which proves that it is possible to fire a federal employee.

Of course, the fact that Whitmore's primary infraction took place on July 10, 2007, and that Whitmore has been sitting at home on administrative leave collecting his $150,000 salary for doing nothing, supports our view that it is a tad bit too difficult to fire a federal employee.

Of course, Whitmore's firing is contentious. Then again, most every firing usually is. It all comes down to spit, and Whitmore seems to think a DNA test could prove his (relative) innocence.

The Post identifies Reason No. 1 as the most serious charge in the 19 page memo produced by Labor officials justifying the action:

Among other things, it says Whitmore's argument with his supervisor, Joe DuBois, got heated to the point that Whitmore was yelling "so uncontrollably that you showered him [DuBois] with your saliva." To the contrary, said Whitmore, who insists DuBois did the spitting. Whitmore said he has an unlaundered shirt to prove he was the one spitted upon.

Ew.

FatCratz has no dog in the fight over Whitmore's guilt or innocence, though he comes across as an unsavory manager. For his part, Whitmore claims to be a persecuted whistleblower. But the mere fact that it takes a 19 page memo, and over 20 months, to fire someone suggests that the process is fundamentally flawed. And the determination to persevere in an action that is so time-consuming and difficult leads this reader to conclude that the firing is probably justified.

Just think how many people deserve to be fired, but aren't, because the process is so time consuming and difficult.

How Often Do You Have To View Porn at Work to Get Fired?

Apparently, 8 isn't enough, but 200 times a day is:

Nine D.C. government employees are being fired for viewing pornography on their work computers, including three who looked at inappropriate sexual images an average of about 200 times per work day in 2007, city officials said yesterday.

Each of the nine employees clicked on porn sites more than 19,000 times last year, according to the results of an internal investigation of 10,000 government computers, officials said. Three visited such sites more than 39,000 times apiece last year, the investigation found.

Thirty-two other employees who visited porn sites more than 2,000 times will receive letters of reprimand or suspensions.

Maybe someone in the DC government could help the folks at NSF out.

"I am trying to learn how to use cam2cam capability on asianbabes.com"

Forget everything we just said about computer literacy. It seems some National Science Foundation employees are very proactive about learning how to get the most out of their agency computers, even contacting tech support themselves on company time:

“I am trying to learn how to use cam2cam capability on your asianbabes.com site,” he wrote in an e-mail message to the site from his agency computer. “I do not seem to be able to do that.”

It seems that the NSF failed to detect the use of pornography in the office by more than 30 years over a period of 10 years. But we should cut them some slack... they're only the National SCIENCE Foundation.

Worse, in 5 of 11 cases, NSF failed to take any disciplinary action. One 20-year employee that acknowledged visiting adult web sites was not disciplined, because the agency was “unable to substantiate allegations sufficiently enough to support disciplinary action.”

How hard is it to discipline or fire federal employees? How much evidence does it take before a supervisor feels secure in carrying out action among even the most offensive employees?

How Hard is it to Fire a Federal Employee?--Cont.

Less than a week underway, I am grateful that an increasing number of FatCratz readers are from outside the beltway (21 states and 7 countries, to be precise). I hope that government employees will contribute to and enjoy FatCratz, and I hope that all citizens will learn from it.

For this wider audience, it's important to make a few crucial distinctions when talking about how difficult it is to fire a federal employee. Staffers who work for Congress are "at will," and can mostly be fired at any time, for any or no cause. Employees of federal agencies--Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, to name a few biggies--fall into two general categories. There are those who enjoy civil service protections, which are designed to protect them (and the expertise they represent) from the vagaries of one political administration or the next. They are protected so they can provide goods or services independently and consistently through a long and fruitful career. And then there are political appointees, the more senior staffers who serve at the will of the President. These are the heads of agencies and their staffs who see to it that the President's policies are implemented so far as practicable (such as Eric Holder at Justice, Arnie Duncan at Education, etc.).

Just so you know where we're coming from, we believe that there are FatCratz in all three of these categories. Presidential appointees, congressional staffers, civil servants--all are shaped and twisted by the bureaucratic organism they inhabit, all hold a little piece of the public trust, and all are now and again corrupted, both by the bureaucracy and by the power. We hope, so far as we're able, to shine a little light on how the concoction that is government is crippled by systemic inefficiences, even as it cripples a number of those who work in its halls.

But, the career employees are doubly difficult to fire, both due to the civil service protections and due to the union protections. These protections prevent a lot of abuse, they also engender some. And there can be no doubt that they create a workforce that is far less dynamic than the private sector, see the "stability" of Virginia Saunders' 63 year career at GPO.

Are we striking the right balance? Most who study the problem say no:

"Very few federal employees -- in the hundreds, not the thousands -- are ever fired on the basis of poor performance," said Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University.

That's out of a federal workforce of 1.86 million, he said.

"If you want to fire an employee, you're taking on a task that is very intense and difficult, and biased in favor of protecting employees, and it can take a year or more to complete," Light said.

Don Kettl, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, agreed that it's too hard to fire poor performers and that few experts who study the issue would disagree.

"The federal civil service is hamstrung by antiquated rules," he said. "We need to make it easier to fire poor performers."

One sign that the balance is off is that most managers won't try to fire someone, at least not without first trying to transfer them elsewhere. It's simply too time consuming, too difficult, and too risky to terminate. I've personally witnessed one termination, which appeared to be an extremely clear cut case, yet the amount of work that went into compiling the complaint went well beyond thorough. It was torturous.

How hard is it to fire government workers? You tell me. I want stories, not regulations, and not, ultimately, statistics.

Do you work with someone who should have been fired, but hasn't been? Have you witnessed firings that were appropriate and painless? Let us know.

How Hard is it to Fire a Federal Employee?

The reason that government is a growth industry is that people are often hired, but rarely fired or laid off.

Most obviously, in the case of the federal government, this is because you can never run out of money. There's no question of profit or loss, or of not having access to credit. The money keeps flowing, so budget realities at particular agencies rarely if ever lead to layoffs.

But it is also extremely difficult to fire a government employee for cause. Some say it's impossible, others say this is a myth, and government employees are fired all the time.

Which is it?