Public workers who are involved have no work ethic, morals, or conscience. In most cases, they’re artificially protected by unions. They have an entitlement attitude. They should be identified and terminated. This is fraud by any defiinition. They tend to malinger and keep their faces in the public trough of benefits. The same goes for WC. These abusers are the source of most of the problems in this country.
Most government workers do have a sense of entitlement, and most feel that once they get a government job they are in for life. Unless it is an elected position, that usually is the case unless you blatantly do something against policy. I watched this all going on when my old girlfriend worked for the gov’t.
Correction for Ben Dover: they aren’t in their gov’t jobs for “life”. They’re only in them until an early, fully-funded retirement kicks in — long before we get one in the private sector, if we get one at all!
Gosh darn, folks, don’t you realize how hard it is to stand around and watch someone else work? Of course, I need extra days off…………it’s darn tuff standing around all day.
I regularly meet with a state government worker who earlier this year had to take an unpaid leave of absence due to state budget shortfalls. He was allowed to take vacation during this time so he wouldn’t lose any pay but then he had to use up vacation time that was not in sinc with his vacation plans. However, when I started to sympathize with him I found out the reason he had so much vacation time was that he used accumlated Comp Time, of which he kept track of himself, when he needed vacation so that he could save and then sell his vacation days back to the state. True Story, by the way can anyone in the private sector explain what “COMP TIME” is?
Lets see if we have public sector workers taking 50% more time off than private workers we could terminate the employment of 50% of the public sector jobs, thus reducing our annual deficit by hundreds of billions.
That is just idea I think the debt commission should take up!
Comp Time is when you work overtime but instead of getting paid you bank the time for future days off. The beauty of this is that most times the OT exceeds the 40 hour limit so they accumulate it at time and a half, and some even have accumulation at double time. I had a friend who basically was allowed to do this and had the whole summer off almost every year.
This didn’t surprise me until I read that this is the first year the public sector sick day rate has exceeded the private sector one. I would have expected this all along.
Also, why doesn’t the BLS include federal workers in its own study, I wonder?
I cannot and do not believe that this is the first time that public exceeded private in sick day rate, especially since it is a good sized margin.
The only explanation is that the private sector workers are thankful to still be employed and therefore stepping it up; or it was that private sector cut or lost a lot of jobs and those people were the slackers in the previous surveys.
I thought if you were salaried there was no such thing as overtime or comp time. But, goverment, salaried employees do comp time as salaried employees are not paid comp time. If this is going on why not just switch every person out there to an hourly pay.
I thought if you were salaried there was no such thing as overtime or comp time. But, goverment, salaried employees do comp time as salaried employees are not paid OVERTIME. If this is going on why not just switch every person out there to an hourly pay
Mostly the Comp Time thing is because there are budgets and cash is sort of limited (until Obama prints more), so they use the comp time and get their annual salary, some overtime pay, and lots of time off.
Mr. Dover, The only way you can get an injured and recovered government worker back to work is to drive them yourself, their sense of entitlement prevents them from demonstrating any type of internal inertia. With that said, I feel these employees deserve a strong pat on the back as they have chosen to differentiat themselves from the usual masses of “Entitled” recipients as they do marginally some type of occupational events for their entitlements.
Don’t forget that a recent study also showed that public salaries and benefits have outstripped those of private company employees by quite a margin. By providing the kind of entitlement mentality so prevelant with public workers, politicians assure themselves of re-election with union support. And those of us in private industry who are not so fortunate suffer the further indignity of paying for all this with increasingly less money for ourselves. Something’s drastically wrong here – wrong enough that unless checked it will throw us into a recession with debt we’ll never recover from. Here in NY, public employees of all ilks can bank vacation days and comp time, receiving a huge cash settlement upon retirement, in addition to having their retirement based upon their last annual salaries which they inflate with scads of overtime. To top it off, many also receive lifetime health care benefits and NY retirements are not taxed by NY, either. Others manage to retire on fully tax-free disability income for life for injuries sclaimed in the last year they worked or for illnesses or injuries claimed from years on the job. No wonder ost folks working for private companies can’t afford a decent retirement when they also have to fund this stuff from their pockets. Notce how politicians talk about cutting Social Security, which would be another indignity to those who pay for all the public employee benefits, but never seem to mention cutting public employee benefits or salaries only suggesting some layoffs, which hardly make a dent in future liabilities.
This is a disturbing article.
180 per 10K private workers
106 per 10K state and local
117 per 10K all combined
Only way that works if there are 5+ state and federal workers for every private worker. I know there are many who think that’s where we are going, but we’re not there yet.
Who knows what else is wrong with the article/report/press release. All you can say is that any conclusions drawn as a result of this report are as meaningless as the report itself.
gigo
I laughed out loud when I read this…..so funny. They wrote this like it was big news. “Laughable”. Yes they miss more work, they have things like health insurance so they can go to the doctor, and short term and long term disability, and weeks and weeks of banked vacation and sick leave. They can afford to take the time off work. In the real world you get two weeks vacation and 5 days sick leave; and it is use it or lose it. No borrowing from next year or saving time. We can’t afford to miss work even if we have a few days coming to us for fear of falling behind and losing our jobs.
What a joke!
Joe, thanks for the correction
I have to assume they fixed that article, because I couldn’t be that stupid :-)
Still is scary math. Without federal employees, state and local employees account for almost 17% of the work force.
Posted: Friday, November 12 2010 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
In New York, a 44-year-old firefighter retires with a $101,000 a year pension, for life. Near Chicago, a parks commissioner quits and begins collecting a $166,000 pension — a sum sweetened by $50,000 thanks to a one-time retirement year windfall of $270,000. And in California, a former city manager pulls down $500,000 in retirement checks every year.
As outrageous as those sunset stipends may seem, they are merely the most visible piece of what critics of generous government pensions say is a ticking time bomb of debt that is threatening to bankrupt a number of states by the end of the decade.
It’s funny to hear these comments when they are directed broadly and not to a specific individual; I have 8 friends who work for the Pentagon and all of them were in favor of getting the message to Washington that we have had enough of the spending. When we talked about getting the fat out of the budget by reducing the payrolls by 10%, they were still in favor of it but when I mentioned that the work they do could be done by 2 of them, do you think any of them volunteered to “get the fat” out, by having their job eliminated? It’s always pork until it is on your plate, isn’t it?
yeah, thank god for republicans who NEVER would dream of increasing the size of governement. Just like those two presidents who spent us into the red, eight years at a time…they were republicrats, weren’t they? Reagan and Dubya? note how much smaller government was after their tenures?
The size of non military Government was lower after Reagan than when he took over from Carter.
You forget that in 2006 through 2008 is when spending really went through the roof.
Obama has quadrupled the national deficit since taking office. He has added more debt in his 2 years than any previous president has since our nation was established. Now he is printing 600 billion out of thin air. Wait until you have to spend $40. for a gallon of milk.
Funny to listen to the talking points of liberals. Just talk but no facts. Always an emotional outburst of pointless ridicule to make a meaningless point.
Bushes fault… Blah Blah Blah… When do you ever state a fact that is relevant to what is going on now? Its funny but also frustrating to talk to idiot leming liberals.
Another point that is often overlooked, and not mentioned, by those criticizing a president over spending is that no president can spend a dime without approval from Congress.
Who would have thought that government workers are not driven to return to work after being injured!
And this is news worthy? Who cares, nothing will ever be done about it anyway so round file it.
I’ve got nothing to add but want to see the comments when they come in.
Let’s start with the commission’s recommendation for a 10% reduction of federal employees.
Public workers who are involved have no work ethic, morals, or conscience. In most cases, they’re artificially protected by unions. They have an entitlement attitude. They should be identified and terminated. This is fraud by any defiinition. They tend to malinger and keep their faces in the public trough of benefits. The same goes for WC. These abusers are the source of most of the problems in this country.
Most government workers do have a sense of entitlement, and most feel that once they get a government job they are in for life. Unless it is an elected position, that usually is the case unless you blatantly do something against policy. I watched this all going on when my old girlfriend worked for the gov’t.
Correction for Ben Dover: they aren’t in their gov’t jobs for “life”. They’re only in them until an early, fully-funded retirement kicks in — long before we get one in the private sector, if we get one at all!
Gosh darn, folks, don’t you realize how hard it is to stand around and watch someone else work? Of course, I need extra days off…………it’s darn tuff standing around all day.
I regularly meet with a state government worker who earlier this year had to take an unpaid leave of absence due to state budget shortfalls. He was allowed to take vacation during this time so he wouldn’t lose any pay but then he had to use up vacation time that was not in sinc with his vacation plans. However, when I started to sympathize with him I found out the reason he had so much vacation time was that he used accumlated Comp Time, of which he kept track of himself, when he needed vacation so that he could save and then sell his vacation days back to the state. True Story, by the way can anyone in the private sector explain what “COMP TIME” is?
Lets see if we have public sector workers taking 50% more time off than private workers we could terminate the employment of 50% of the public sector jobs, thus reducing our annual deficit by hundreds of billions.
That is just idea I think the debt commission should take up!
I think it is about time we just shut it down and start over! All work should be subcontracted out by government. ALL WORK!
Comp Time is when you work overtime but instead of getting paid you bank the time for future days off. The beauty of this is that most times the OT exceeds the 40 hour limit so they accumulate it at time and a half, and some even have accumulation at double time. I had a friend who basically was allowed to do this and had the whole summer off almost every year.
Like the current President is going to go for that. He’s trying to build the government even bigger.
This didn’t surprise me until I read that this is the first year the public sector sick day rate has exceeded the private sector one. I would have expected this all along.
Also, why doesn’t the BLS include federal workers in its own study, I wonder?
I cannot and do not believe that this is the first time that public exceeded private in sick day rate, especially since it is a good sized margin.
The only explanation is that the private sector workers are thankful to still be employed and therefore stepping it up; or it was that private sector cut or lost a lot of jobs and those people were the slackers in the previous surveys.
Public servant? Who is serving who.
The government was not created to employ people but rather allow the private sector to grow. GOVERNMENT SHOULD SUBCONTRACT OUT EVERYTHING!
This artlcle made me sick, so sick I think that I will call out tomorow. Oh wait! I dont work for the government so I cant.
I thought if you were salaried there was no such thing as overtime or comp time. But, goverment, salaried employees do comp time as salaried employees are not paid comp time. If this is going on why not just switch every person out there to an hourly pay.
I need to start proofing before sending!!!
I thought if you were salaried there was no such thing as overtime or comp time. But, goverment, salaried employees do comp time as salaried employees are not paid OVERTIME. If this is going on why not just switch every person out there to an hourly pay
Mostly the Comp Time thing is because there are budgets and cash is sort of limited (until Obama prints more), so they use the comp time and get their annual salary, some overtime pay, and lots of time off.
Mr. Dover, The only way you can get an injured and recovered government worker back to work is to drive them yourself, their sense of entitlement prevents them from demonstrating any type of internal inertia. With that said, I feel these employees deserve a strong pat on the back as they have chosen to differentiat themselves from the usual masses of “Entitled” recipients as they do marginally some type of occupational events for their entitlements.
Don’t forget that a recent study also showed that public salaries and benefits have outstripped those of private company employees by quite a margin. By providing the kind of entitlement mentality so prevelant with public workers, politicians assure themselves of re-election with union support. And those of us in private industry who are not so fortunate suffer the further indignity of paying for all this with increasingly less money for ourselves. Something’s drastically wrong here – wrong enough that unless checked it will throw us into a recession with debt we’ll never recover from. Here in NY, public employees of all ilks can bank vacation days and comp time, receiving a huge cash settlement upon retirement, in addition to having their retirement based upon their last annual salaries which they inflate with scads of overtime. To top it off, many also receive lifetime health care benefits and NY retirements are not taxed by NY, either. Others manage to retire on fully tax-free disability income for life for injuries sclaimed in the last year they worked or for illnesses or injuries claimed from years on the job. No wonder ost folks working for private companies can’t afford a decent retirement when they also have to fund this stuff from their pockets. Notce how politicians talk about cutting Social Security, which would be another indignity to those who pay for all the public employee benefits, but never seem to mention cutting public employee benefits or salaries only suggesting some layoffs, which hardly make a dent in future liabilities.
This is a disturbing article.
180 per 10K private workers
106 per 10K state and local
117 per 10K all combined
Only way that works if there are 5+ state and federal workers for every private worker. I know there are many who think that’s where we are going, but we’re not there yet.
Who knows what else is wrong with the article/report/press release. All you can say is that any conclusions drawn as a result of this report are as meaningless as the report itself.
gigo
I laughed out loud when I read this…..so funny. They wrote this like it was big news. “Laughable”. Yes they miss more work, they have things like health insurance so they can go to the doctor, and short term and long term disability, and weeks and weeks of banked vacation and sick leave. They can afford to take the time off work. In the real world you get two weeks vacation and 5 days sick leave; and it is use it or lose it. No borrowing from next year or saving time. We can’t afford to miss work even if we have a few days coming to us for fear of falling behind and losing our jobs.
What a joke!
Re-do your math. I think you got your numbers backwards or they corrected the article since you posted.
“The rate among local and state government workers was 180 to 185 cases per 10,000 full-time workers compared to 106 cases for private firms.”
Joe, thanks for the correction
I have to assume they fixed that article, because I couldn’t be that stupid :-)
Still is scary math. Without federal employees, state and local employees account for almost 17% of the work force.
These are the same people we want to be in charge of paying our health insurance claims?
Something has got to “change” in 2012.
This article on MSNBC this morning.
Posted: Friday, November 12 2010 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
In New York, a 44-year-old firefighter retires with a $101,000 a year pension, for life. Near Chicago, a parks commissioner quits and begins collecting a $166,000 pension — a sum sweetened by $50,000 thanks to a one-time retirement year windfall of $270,000. And in California, a former city manager pulls down $500,000 in retirement checks every year.
As outrageous as those sunset stipends may seem, they are merely the most visible piece of what critics of generous government pensions say is a ticking time bomb of debt that is threatening to bankrupt a number of states by the end of the decade.
WOW!
It’s funny to hear these comments when they are directed broadly and not to a specific individual; I have 8 friends who work for the Pentagon and all of them were in favor of getting the message to Washington that we have had enough of the spending. When we talked about getting the fat out of the budget by reducing the payrolls by 10%, they were still in favor of it but when I mentioned that the work they do could be done by 2 of them, do you think any of them volunteered to “get the fat” out, by having their job eliminated? It’s always pork until it is on your plate, isn’t it?
yeah, thank god for republicans who NEVER would dream of increasing the size of governement. Just like those two presidents who spent us into the red, eight years at a time…they were republicrats, weren’t they? Reagan and Dubya? note how much smaller government was after their tenures?
The size of non military Government was lower after Reagan than when he took over from Carter.
You forget that in 2006 through 2008 is when spending really went through the roof.
Obama has quadrupled the national deficit since taking office. He has added more debt in his 2 years than any previous president has since our nation was established. Now he is printing 600 billion out of thin air. Wait until you have to spend $40. for a gallon of milk.
Funny to listen to the talking points of liberals. Just talk but no facts. Always an emotional outburst of pointless ridicule to make a meaningless point.
Bushes fault… Blah Blah Blah… When do you ever state a fact that is relevant to what is going on now? Its funny but also frustrating to talk to idiot leming liberals.
Another point that is often overlooked, and not mentioned, by those criticizing a president over spending is that no president can spend a dime without approval from Congress.
Rusty, do you mean like when Obama and the Democrats shut the doors and pushed the healthcare reform through???
The Democrats took control of congress in 2006 not 2008, and have bankrupted this country.
Vote the rest of them out in 2012!