Bacon's Rebellion

Tough Love for State Employees

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by

James A. Bacon
in

The Warner administration has delivered some very tough — but very necessary — news to employees of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. As Peter Bacque put it in this morning’s Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Despite official assurances that their jobs will be secure through Virginia’s information-technology outsourcing, state government IT employees cannot expect to remain in their jobs in retirement, officials now say.

“The whole concept of lifetime employment doesn’t exist anymore,” said Secretary of Technology Eugene J. Huang.

Don’t be surprised if a lot of people want to shoot the messenger. But Huang is only saying what needs to be said. No one in the private sector enjoys lifetime employment. Employees’ only security comes from their ability to stay employable by embracing the skills required by a fast-evolving economy.

State employees are insulated from direct competition in the sense that state employees from North Carolina or Texas aren’t going to take away their jobs. But Virginia companies compete in a global economy, and their social overhead includes the cost in taxation of supporting state government. As the Warner administration seems to understand, the state cannot continue doing Business as Usual. (If only the Warnerites would apply insights gleaned from the reforming government processes to fundamentally restructuring the way the state approaches education, transportation and health care!)

The Commonwealth is negotiating with IBM and Northrop Grumman to privatize significant chunks of its computer and electronic-communications infrastructure. If a deal is struck, it could be, according to Bacque, “the farthest-reaching such outsourcing among U.S. state governments.” More than 2,000 state employees could see their jobs directly affected.

VITA has promised no mass layoffs, but a lifetime sinecure in state government is not in the cards. “My generation has . . . been told that lifetime employment is not a given,” said Huang, who is 29. “Over the course of one’s lifetime, one can expect upwards of six or seven different jobs.”

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if Virginia’s other cabinet secretaries were delivering the same message?

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  1. Will Vehrs Avatar
    Will Vehrs

    Jim, I don’t disagree with you, but this is a bit of a red herring. The goalposts on this IT outsourcing seem to keep shifting. I don’t think many state employees expect a lifetime job, but I do think they expected a little more transparency in efforts to remove hundreds of them for a half-baked outsourcing plan. Why Huang is bringing this issue up is beyond me–it’s apt to further alienate state workers.

    I remain surprised that the vaunted VITA, supposedly the crown jewel of Warner’s efforts to reform state government, is the organization that is going to be outsourced. Employees who a few months ago were winning plaudits are now being told they’re nothing but a bunch of security seeking bureaucrats.

  2. theShadow Avatar
    theShadow

    I think the thing that angers most state employees is that they feel abused. They’ve been lied to, treated like ignorant children, and “poo-poo’ed” like some sort of fungus that have had no part in the success the state has had to date. And now that a private company will be selected to handle IT, the folks who have been keeping everything running are being told, “Thanks for your help; don’t let the door hit you in the ass.”

  3. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Oh boy, expect a bunch of whining from state employees on this thread.

    “But I was told that I could keep my job sitting in an office behind a desk doing nothing for the rest of my life! How dare you replace me?”

  4. Becky Dale Avatar
    Becky Dale

    Does a state employee cost more than a private employee? Like in benefits (retirement, health insurance)perhaps? How does pay compare for state employees and private employees doing similar jobs? Will the VITA employees being absorbed into the private companies lose their benefits or will the companies be required to offer something comparable to them?

  5. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    When did it become ok in the Commonwealth, or in the USA for that matter, to believe that the bottom line is all that matters? These IT employees have been keeping the Commonwealth afloat on “a string and a prayer” for more than 20 years. Now that the politicians are willing to finally spend some money on technology, these people are somehow not good enough to carry it through? They are not idiots. They’ve had to come up with some pretty inventive ways of making everything work with little or no money. To me this outsourcing is just a cleaned up way of firing people who have earned the right to make a decent salary and a decent retirement. It’s a nice way for politicians to bail out on yet another promise under the cloak of saving a penny. And what about these companies? The bottom line here is they are profit organizations! Where do you think the profit is coming from? Do you want your private information sitting on technology that’s being managed by last year’s high school hacker just because he’s willing to work for minimum wage? It won’t stop with IT if someone doesn’t make a stand for what is right. Let’s see… it’s cheaper to teach our children if we hook them all up to broadband and telecast all the classes to their bedrooms… We could teach all the kids in the nation with 100 minimum-paid teachers! It’s cheaper therefore it must be better, right? When did it become ok to sell out on 2000 dedicated, hardworking citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia? When did it become ok to teach our children that it’s no longer important to be dedicated or work hard because the jobs are going to the lowest bidder not the best bidder? Maybe some of the higher-ups don’t believe dedication and hard work are important. Maybe they don’t think Commonwealth employees should be rewarded with little things like decent pay and retirement but wouldn’t it be interesting to see if their opinion changed if they weren’t wealthy and actually had to consider how they were going to make it in this world?

  6. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Anon, 12:55 & others:

    Sorry about your bad luck but welcome to the real world.

    Several friends were just laid off at a local factory. One had 30 years of service. He was given $1500 and a, “thanks for your service” letter and that was it. He has no benefits, no insurance, nothing. He was literally kicked to the curb.

    Simply because you have a government job does not and should not mean you are somehow immune to the hazards that others in our economy face.

    It’s a free market and we are all at its mercy.

  7. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    It’s not my bad luck. I’m not an employee of VITA. I have worked with many of them for many, many years though. That’s the whole problem. People with the mentality that they don’t have to care because it doesn’t directly affect them are losing out in the long run. It’s coming home to every company in the “free market” as you call it. Just because it’s happening in other places, factories, farms, etc. does not make it right or acceptable. The government, as leaders of the community can and should set an example of doing what is right so that more Virginians and Americans don’t lose their jobs to these companies that outsource to India and wherever else they can make a buck on a human back.

  8. Steve Haner Avatar
    Steve Haner

    If the bottom line is all that matters, why not have a call center in Bombay? There is a certain amount of “have your cake and eat it” going on with all this. My experiences with the state work force have left an overall stronly favorable impression, and they do make less money in exchange for excellent benefits and the kind of job security that is getting rare in this world.

    It is fair to say that change is not a big word with them, and it is fair to say that many have not embraced the Warner Administration’s vision on the IT sector. But it isn’t just about expecting life-time employment. But if your goal is to move them in a different direction, the tactics you are applauding, Jim, are unlikely to succeed. The carrot has always worked better than the stick.

  9. Steve Haner Avatar
    Steve Haner

    Let me add that my deepest experience was in one of the “at will” agencies where nobody suffered under the illusion they could not be fired, and frankly that is one change I would recommend for the rest of state government. But it is interesting how that works both ways, and puts some additional pressure on management to earn good morale and loyalty. Managers can no longer complain, well of course I failed, because the troops were agin’ me. And managers can no longer complain, gee I’d love to get rid of xxx, but its too hard to fire someone.

  10. union man Avatar
    union man

    You have to hand it to the Warner/Kaine Administration. Yet another attempt to pander to Republicans by throwing a privatization bone. Kaine will get about 15 Republican votes from this. So what’s new? This is one life-long Democrat who is voting for Potts.

  11. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    You said “But I was told that I could keep my job sitting in an office behind a desk doing nothing for the rest of my life! How dare you replace me?”

    I worked for several years as a local government employee working for a state department. Most of my co-workers were state employees. I wasn’t.

    The state IT employees I knew were hustling like crazy, not sitting behind a desk doing nothing. There was never enough staff, never enough equipment, and never enough training. In nearly 20 years of working in IT in every sector, I’ve never seen folks doing more with less.

    What really raises the old red flag for me are those comments about “cultural resistance.” While I was working there, I found out that a lot of the complexities of government systems are due to the data gathering requirements of FEDERAL grants that fund or co-fund these programs. I often heard politically appointed upper management write off real needs as “cultural resistance.”

    Ten years ago, I heard a lot of “pie in the sky” comments then about “duplicative systems” – which, when you looked into them with knowledge, were not actually duplicative. They had to be different because they had different data gathering requirements and they did different things.

    A different system to give a restaurant permit versus a septic tank permit versus a marriage license does not necessarily indicate inefficient systems. It indicates different data elements and different needs.

    At that time, reason prevailed and the efforts to marry a walrus and a canary were dropped. Sounds like now they are being pushed through. When it just doesn’t work, I guess the taxpayer’s left holding the bag.

    It isn’t just the IT folks getting the shaft.

  12. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Who in the world ever said any state employee thinks they can work in any capacity for life? Good Grief! We get lay offs every time the economy burps, a new Governor comes in or some head honcho at some big agency decides they know the greatest way to save money. Please!!! I could go on and on… any time we don’t agree with a supervisor with the latest greatest plan we hear “be glad you have a job”, “be glad you have insurance at all”, “it’s what the taxpayers want”. I took my daughter to the doc for stomache pains. By the time our wonderful insurance paid their $78 for the ultrasounds and lab tests, my portion was $1,212! You want to talk about the “buying power” of the state for IT, what about the buying power for health care! With over 100,000 employees, it seems like we could at least get as good a deal as my husband’s small business!!! These are the same people that are bragging about knowing how to get the “great deals”. I am VERY grateful I have a job and I am VERY grateful I have any health insurance, but I really do take offense at having the public groaning on about state employees being lazy life-timers when we are working our butts off doing more than ever with half the people and pay that is way below the private sector. We don’t even qualify as real humans when it comes to flsa rules for normal employees. They don’t apply to government employees. It’s also disgusting for our own leaders to go ranting about how the “idiots” in the agencies are wasting millions of dollars on this and billions of dollars on that when he doesn’t even understand what “this and that” is!!! I would honestly love to know where does the public get this perception that state employees don’t work as hard as the private sector? And will the taxpayers (which I am one as well) be excited to know that I now have a computer on my desk that cost the taxpayers hundreds more than the exact same computer I have at home??? Now that’s VITA buying power!

  13. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Yeah, has anyone figured out yet why VITA made our agencies buy these pc’s that have a gazillion mb of hard drive that we don’t have security to use, a cd-writer that we don’t have security to use, and a dvd player? Maybe we need the dvd player so we can watch movies when we’re waiting for the oursourced service person from New Delhi? Maybe DVD training you say? Right! We can’t even afford pens and pencils anymore! Also, can someone let me know when we start getting all those great benefits and promises of employment in exchange for the lousy pay???

  14. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Someone please contact 60 Minutes, 48 Hours or Giraldo, Seriously!

    – The JLARC survey shows the disatisfied agencies results, HELL-OOOH!, who’s listening though?

    – Tax payers unaware of the VITA 5% mark up which ultimately affects them.

    – Altering the numbers to create a better picture (stating angencies pay more than they actually do to show a cost savings they claim).

    – Centralization has failed several times already in VA.

    – AMS now AMS-CGI did not meet their 4 year contractual goal with Dept. of Tax and is struggling now. Are you do to receive a tax refund and wonder where it’s at or an accountant that cannot obtain your information yet?

    – AMS now AMS-CGI has been sued by other states for not meeting their contractual agreements, look it up on Google.

    – Lies, and deceipt, ask any true hard working non pen pushing state IT employee.

    Organization, and buying power make GOOD sense and can be done without altering the workforce in a negative manor. The money was never made available until someone decided that this could be a way to get him nominated for President one day. The politicians, the vendors that won, the area’s selected and the vendors partners all played a part.

    These few factors point to the BIG nasty question.

    Corrupted government in Virginia?

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