Patricia Lake
44 years in the trenches
Can you imagine being in your job for 40 years? Senior Correspondent Mike Causey says it can do things, sometimes good, sometimes bad to a person.
Mike Causey is on vacation. While he’s away, he’s invited guest columnists to fill in. Today’s guest columnist, a long-time federal employee, asked for this column to be published anonymously. These views do not represent the opinion of Federal News Radio.
Are you a federal lifer? Are you happy, or nervous in the civil service? What are the secrets of survival? And is it worth it all?
We put the question to a long, long-time Social Security Administration worker. He says it can be done, but the question is should it be done? Hope you like it:
Think of Ron’s columns — about how you get so down about these things.
Ask Bert how they did it. Is it a great secret?
Is the government a good place to work these days? It depends on what group you’re in. My group, not so much. The way things are set up now, you can’t even talk about such things, yet they obviously need to, at least, be brought to light of day. We can’t even speak, in public, that there are affirmative action quotas for women, minorities and veterans, or that these set-asides have been in place for 48 years now. Will affirmative action stop? One doubts it, even though all set-aside groups are now statistically over-represented in the government.
Or that people, who can’t even write a grammatically correct sentence, are now senior managers. Or that these quotas leave very little for another group and that this is another form of discrimination. Or that all your experience and hard work can just be ignored willy-nilly. To say these things is politically incorrect and verboten and so I will probably be quashed by the powers. The Supreme Court is probably going to deal with this issue (with a good chance such things will be abolished) and everyone will finally have to be evaluated on the value of their work and experience, etc.
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We are now being inculcated with videos on things like respecting LGBTs. Why can’t we be shown videos on respecting people whose deep values have been held for thousands of years and who represent the vast majority of the population? Your right to freedom of religion, specified in the Constitution, is now being trampled into the dust. And you can’t even say that in the workplace. If you buck the system in any public way of dissent, you will probably be escorted out of the building and fired. There is no real recourse anymore. (As a little aside, there really is no protection for whistleblowers, if there ever was.)
There really is no longer such a thing as the common good, that is, respecting all people. It is now about catering to the agendas of small groups at the expense of larger groups. This is the prevailing persona in the government now.
More often than not, we are in a state of dis-ease. You reach a point where, as my mom would say, you have to offer it up for the poor souls. My own rationale, after 44 years of government service, is to put up with it for the sake of my family. It is kind of all that is left.
Maybe next time we might talk about the transfer of wealth from the middle class or the transfer of jobs out of the country. Feds, as a group, were greatly affected by both phenomena.
Publius
Nearly Useless Factoid
The original running time for D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic silent film “Intolerance” was 210 minutes.
Source: Wikipedia
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Mike Causey
Mike Causey is senior correspondent for Federal News Network and writes his daily Federal Report column on federal employees’ pay, benefits and retirement.
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