For people saying Civil service doesnt deserve a pay raise what about people like me, after 10 years active duty I landed an ART position in the reserves, its full time reservist but by law I have to be civil service except during drill or a deployment.


I work my butt off as well keeping antique aircraft flying, the chemicals and solvents im exposed to on a daily basis will take about 10 years off my life... Ive earned a decent pay rate and retirement serving my country.


As it stands if me and the wife can keep the marriage together then Ill be able to retire around 50 ish and enjoy a couple years before dieing... but considering she will be deployed for 6 months a year and Im looking at 4 month a year deployments I dont know how we will keep it together seeing each other for a whole 2 months each year.

People against pay raises for public employees aren't against it for you MM.

They are against it for the made up public employee in their heads, whom we shall call Government Richie. Like the mystical Welfare Queen is everyone on Welfare, Government Richie inhabits all public sector jobs. He works 10 hours a week, makes several hundred thousand dollars a year, doesn't pay his taxes and is probably a yankees fan to boot. On top of all that - and worst of all - he belongs to a union.

Government richie is everywhere! But he's not you MM.

 

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Any system that gives raises based on time served rather than quality of work is a broken system. Odd... who would have thought government would like and work using broken and wrong idea.

You see, the problem is... they actually are.

The world is REPLETE with these overpaid, politically protected, generally untouchable, primarily incompetent, incented-to-be-mediocre morons.

I'm not rattling off the 20+ people I know in the sector and scores of examples, state and federal. But it's there. It's endemic. It's pathetic.

 

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Since you're generally incompetent at evaluating anything, including your own worth as an individual, color me unconvinced.

 

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It's widespread. It's ingrained. It's pathetic.

And, it resides in most of the places it shouldn't.

Cops, teachers, firefighters and those who should be getting props... tend to get the shaft. To fund the useless administrators, armies of incompetent regulators, and political cronies clogging up the works.

 

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Despite the stupid in most of what AA says, this is one hundred percent true. And even direct contractors to the gov't are very similar. When you have a bureaucracy with basically unlimited funds, you will end up with people who are good at avoiding blame and little else. This is universal in my experience from plush departments at big companies with little oversight to most gov't agencies and their offshoots.

 

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There are definitely lots of incompetent people who work for the government. When I started working at my job and applied for health benefits the people in the benefits department (a notorious place for incompetents) never even sent my application to the health insurer. Even though they were deducting fees from my paycheck.

I didn't find out for a month until I tried to use my insurance and found out I wasn't even in the insurer's system. I sent an email to the benefits department, which they promptly ignored. Finally I had to just fax in the application myself from the copy I had wisely kept for myself because they just totally ignored my email and when I phoned them they told me to do it myself because they had lost my application and didn't have any copies. wtf?

But I don't really see why that means I shouldn't get a raise.

P.S. Contractors are even worse. Almost every time the government decides to privatize a function and farm it out to contractors it ends up costing more and working less well.