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Wondering if there is a plan for employing laid off federal employees
I joined Ricochet for reading. I really enjoy the thought-provoking informative posts and discussions here. I hardly ever post anything online.
This is my first post. I am wondering what everyone’s opinion is – when these layoffs were planned, was any thought given to where these laid-off people will get jobs? Some of them have pretty narrow/limited skill sets, I would guess, and they are white-collar, so they probably won’t be willing to go into construction when jobs become available after illegal immigrants leave.
And after years of not being used to job hunting, like we are in the commercial sector, they will feel pretty vulnerable and disgruntled.
I just saw this article on CNN saying that Russia/China intelligence services stepped up their efforts to recruit freshly laid-off employees with security clearances, and people who feel they could be laid off soon. It’s not unexpected.
What do you all think: where can all these people be employed?
Published in General
They can learn to code (but they better hurry, since Grok is learning quickly). The problem is that there are not many jobs that pay $120K+ and don’t require much getting done. These people are going to have to take jobs where they work harder and get paid less. That’s fair.
Good article, thanks, Marina.
I wasn’t aware of the part about the stepped up recruiting by Russia and China of recently laid-off Govt. workers.
That came after the intelligence community workers, NSA and CIA mostly I think, were revealed to have been chatting on official networks about all their sexual fantasies, said to be more than 100 employees.
conditions will cause adjustments that might include some relocations-America is a big country.
Kind of indicates why the family concept is important, huh?
At least for the first grouping, they offered a buy-out that would include several months of pay to allow a transition period. That’s a soft landing.
Another fact is that many who are being cut are still in a probationary period, meaning they have not worked for the USFG for very long. For instance, there was that locksmith in Yosemite or Yellowstone or whichever park it was. And that brings us to the fact that not all are white collar workers. I would assume a locksmith ought to be able to land on his feet.
You ask, “was any thought given to where there laid off people will get jobs?” I do not know, but I doubt it. I know that companies I have worked for and decided they had to cut me did not care where I went next.
Maybe they can all move to California and get government jobs there?
I totally agree that it’s fair. After ~25 years in regular IT jobs I am used to always learning and always ready for the next layoff. Don’t see a lot of jobs getting replaced by AI yet but a lot of jobs getting offshored with disastrous impact on quality of software.
The family concept is critical, as is the concept of having skills or knowledge to do something that someone else is willing to pay you todo or know, so they don’t have to or can’t. People losing jobs is not new.
I remember a lot 0f people (professionals and moderate skilled people) from MI moving to TX when the auto industry went through its first big firing shock in later ‘70’s and early ‘80’s. Coleman Young had pretty well killed Detroit and the big factories were laying off thousands and trying to figure out their over production problem. Later in the ‘80’s a lot of people left Houston because the rig count was blasted, tax shelters were gone and real estate became very cheap. Then there were the timber jobs eliminated to make some environmentalists happy. Oh – and the dot com collapse made traffic in Santa Clara county a breeze. Keystone pipeline. Covid lockdown. Most of those firings did not come with severance packages covering months of income.
I’d say that limited skill sets (what does a DC bureaucrat do? is something some people are trying to find out) combined with unwillingness to figure out alternate employment will result in lowered standard of living and real discomfort for some and their families. That’s unfortunate for their families, but I figure I’ve been over paying taxes for their limited skill sets long enough to really feel responsible for thinking about their next steps. If they are active players in the money laundering I expect they have some savings. I think any fired should lose security clearances which ought not be going to the highest bidder.
That doesn’t make the sting less for those who were laid off.
I do not relish seeing people who legitimately worked for government having their lives upended through these actions anymore than I relish people in the private sector having their lives upended through layoffs. We thought it callous when the Maria Antoinettes of the left said “Let them learn to code” when their policies visited economic havoc on the private sectors, so I will not engage in the same type of callousness here. Their jobs may or may not be necessary, but I am not assuming that they have not been performing reasonably simply because they work for the government. There is no need to add insult to injury.
State and local governments will have plenty of candidates to choose from, but they might not be able to afford too many new hires as the Federal spigot runs dry.
No, it certainly does not. But part of what the conversation starter said was:
I was addressing her point about them not being used to it. Many of them may be a little too freshly used to looking for work. That is not an excuse to be callous, nor is recognizing it callous. Simply pointing out that they may have much more current job search skills than Marina envisioned.
There is no”plan” that I’m aware of, and this is going to have a domino effect throughout the DC area—once viewed as recession proof. Some (many?) should consider selling their (overvalued) homes, taking any equity and severance pay and relocating.
Welcome to Ricochet Marina!
Overaged, overpaid, overweight, and overspecialized. That’s how the defense workers were described when the wall fell and the downsizing began in the early 1990s. One company employed according to its brochure, the one that I read when I was hired, 26,800 local employees. When I retired, there were less than 10,000. In the mid-1990s, one could go to the Westech job fairs in Sunnyvale and find that his/her defense-related skills were not in demand, in fact were treated as a red flag. No one gave any thought to where the laid off workers were to find employment. The recruiters laughed at them behind their backs. It was a tough time for them.
Still, some of my co-workers complained even though they had fairly secure jobs, secure at least until the current contract was over. I couldn’t believe the sense of entitlement they had, and I see the same in the government workers getting the axe today. At one time, the government recruiting pitch was that even though the pay was below the commercial market, they could offer security and pensions. Today, they offer more pay than the commercial market and pensions, when pensions in the commercial world seem to be rare. Welcome to the jungle.
I’m sorry. I had selected that quote because I was going to make another point, as I’ve been told that some of the probationary employees may have switched jobs in government but in fact were long time government employees. But then I thought about what I know about probationary periods in government and felt it was likely that their probationary period did not restart because they switched job. So I changed my point. What I have been hearing on the news and also on Ricochet (and on this thread) is an assumption that government workers are just feeding at the public trough and so we are well rid of them. There is no need for that type of dismissal of human beings. Cutting the federal workforce is absolutely necessary, but workforce = people, and losing your job is a terrible thing. I just feel some empathy is called for.
I worked as a contractor to the Federal government most of my life. During that time I have been through nearly a dozen RIFs, layoffs and contract changes. I do not remember once when I got much beyond lip service from the Civil Servants for whom we worked when we got let go. They did not care. Our job was to cushion them from layoff. We were the sacrificial anodes to protect them from the corrosive effects of government downsizing.
I will probably lose my job if NASA downsizes because I am a subcontractor. Subcontractors are always the first to go. I already have a plan in hand if that happens. As for the Civil Servants who lose jobs? Too bad, so sad. I’ve been told I will be able to cope with a layoff by Civil Servants for 40+ years. Your turn guys. Since you keep telling how much better you are than me (because you are Civil Servants and I am a contractor) I am sure you will do just fine. If not? Oh well. Anyway.
There was no locksmith. There was a probationary employee who supposedly had responsibility for all the keys in a park.
Which sounds sketchy. What type of organization gives a newbie charge of all of the keys? Why, in a massive park is there just one individual with keys? The story doesn’t pass the smell test. It sounds like a combination of malicious compliance and a fairy tail fed to a complicit press.
I have a friend who just lost her job due to the USAID cutbacks.
She is a professional storyteller (she even has a college degree in storytelling from a second level state school). She was head of storytelling for the World Bank, in charge of putting programs on to make the executives better understand the plight of poor children in poor countries around the world.
She has spent 20 years moving from one job like that to another, from one NGO or govt organization to another. She has never been unemployed.
She’s a lovely person, and I’m sure she’s good at her job.
She is on Facebook every day now, lashing out at the injustice of it all. She’s absolutely stunned. And I understand her perspective.
I’m a self-employed physician, and I’ve had my practice collapse four times in my career, requiring me to completely start over. Every time Medicare laws change, or Obamacare passes, or whatever, then whatever I was doing before doesn’t work anymore. I have to start over. I’m not an employee of a big group with a legal and a compliance department. I’m on my own. And I’m accustomed to starting over. Over and over again.
I don’t like it. But I’m accustomed to it.
I’m a physician. She’s a professional story teller .
And she is just shocked that she could ever be subject to changes in her career.
I’m good at something important. So I need to find ways to earn a living doing it. And I’ve always been able to do so. Largely because other people (my patients) find my job to be important, as well. And they’re willing to pay me to do it.
She is good at something that she believes to be important. So she needs to find a way to earn a living doing it. I hope that she can. If she can’t, perhaps she should start doing something else.
We’ll see.
That’s how the job market works.
Neither one of us likes it.
I, at least, understand it.
It’s not right or wrong. It’s just life.
He was an “apprentice” to the former long tenure “locksmith.” In my limited experience, the NPS jobs are as close to a closed nepotism system as you can get. (Like a McDonalds franchise or taxi medallion before Uber.) He’d been “trained” by the NPS locksmith as a civilian. Seems pretty unlikely all around that there was 1 and only 1 set of “keys.”
I understand it to the extent that losing a job is a big deal and it’s unsurprising that it would provoke a reaction. However, “lashing out” only reminds many of us how divorced some of these folks are from reality. Being in the DC area and having worked for a time in the gov., I’m inclined to be sympathetic–particularly for those whom termination was a sudden event. If some of the “victims” showed at least some understanding that “stuff happens,” I’d be even more understanding.
I agree with this statement. Anyone losing their job suddenly should receive a measure of understanding for the anger and fear they are experiencing. Federal or otherwise, reasonable cause or unreasonable cause. That is what I am advocating for – just empathy. But no one is entitled to lifetime employment. I’ve tried to counsel my people at work, as we are deeply affected by what is going on and we may not survive this. But we were lucky through the other convulsive events that hit the American workforce over the last two decades: the 2008 financial meltdown and the pandemic, and we should acknowledge that even as we may think our current situation is unfair Life is not fair.
I laughed at professional storyteller with degree in storytelling, but I like to think I have some small degree of self-awareness, so I remembered trimming the beard, putting on a coat and tie, and standing up to tell the assembled group in a polished camp counselor baritone voice that: 1) you need this, 2) we are the best people to build it, 3) it’s well worth the asking price.
Yeah, they listened, and I stayed employed. As much as we liked to call it a “proposal”, it was just storytelling.
Couldn’t find a video clip, but Star Trek does have the answer:
A job is an exchange of value. It only exists as long as someone is willing to pay for it. If federal bureaucrats don’t understand that they are running on fumes, whose fault is that?
The government also has a lot of empty office building scattered around. Would it be hard to outfit a bunch of them with desks and phones and give the laid off workers a seat and a little training? Then when one of us calls the government with a question we would get a “Hello, yes, how can we help you?” instead of “Please listen carefully, as our menu options have recently changed”.
They may not enjoy it, but they would be being undeniably useful for the taxpayer dollar, and it would keep them in $$ until they found something else.
Oh, and finally the menu options would actually have recently changed. 😂
Or how hard would it be to come up with a list of protocols, possibly even a simple checklist, on how to tell quickly whether a person seeking asylum has a legitimate claim? We could set up thousands of offices all around the country, in strip malls or wherever it is convenient to the public, and then Tom Homan can insist that anyone who came illegally but was given a date to appear for adjudication but who blew it off and just blended in, has six months to show up at a local adjudication station and get back into the process. Anybody then caught still here illegally is obviously not intending to play ball, and they are deported summarily. (Of course 90% of the ones who show up will likely not be eligible either, so I can see a weakness in this plan. 🤨)
But at least if we give them a fair chance, accept the reality that Obama and Biden purposely practically invited them to come, and they still hide and flip us the bird, I feel a lot less sad about saying adios. Or sayonara. Or whatever it is in Chinese.
How many laid off workers will there be? We’d need quite a few to get through 30,000,000 illegals expeditiously. 🤔
But any of that would require continuing to pay them, and a big part of the idea was to NOT keep paying them, hence saving money.
I hope everybody finds a job and goes on to be productive and prosperous members of a well-oiled economy.
I have a feeling that among the former federal employees, those with degrees that employers regularly hire are going to be among the first to successfully transition. If this experience directs students to the more practical majors, graduates will be better able to navigate a job loss. Universities will hopefully see a decline in demand for, well, storytelling and the like.
It would be interesting to see whether a lot of these job seekers could compete for jobs in education. Teachers unions likely won’t let it happen on a broad scale, but there’s always a shortage of math teachers, right?
It feels awful when the job rug gets pulled out from under. Got the kids, got the mortgage, got the pressure. When you come out on the other side, there’s a feeling of genuine accomplishment.
If any of those former Federal employees have a master’s degree they could join the online proletariat as adjunct professors.
Sounds like another who has been there and done that before.
Oh, dear me!
Any former Federal employee who meets the minimum standards could always enlist in the military.