Courtesy of a
WashPost article, here's what Ron Ault, president of the AFL-CIO's Metal Trades Division, told his minions in an email referencing the Pentagon's plan to rework civil service personnel policies and bring them into the 21st century:
In your workplace, be creative, be disruptive, be a royal pain in the ass!!
That's great Ron, thanks for being constructive.
Ron really isn't worried about being constructive, because:
All of this is going to end up being decided in federal courts, so as I see it we gain nothing by being led quietly to slaughter, talking nice and being polite
Ron thinks that the White House never "clearly defined what was broken and needed to be fixed"
Well, allow me Ron.
Everything is broken and needs to be fixed. Having supervised many DoD civil servants in the past, I've seen it all up close and personal. The government's current civil service policies make it mind-numbingly difficult to accomplish basic management tasks. You can't hire who you want, it takes 6 months to hire whoever you get, you can't fire people who are 100% unqualified to do their jobs, and you have to have a PhD in OPM policies to avoid stepping on political landmines. I have seen full bird Colonels, commanders of medical facilities, deathly afraid to speak the plain truth about civil servants who were not getting the job done, because they have seen peers' careers sidetracked by an open-ended civil service grievance process that allows a small percentage of troublemakers to bring the world to a screeching halt so they can bitch.
Finally, the government is
doing something about all this, and all the unions know how to do is keep bitching:
Our job is to be the irritant, piss ant stinging them on their ankles at every opportunity
Keep it up, Ron. You're destined for the dustbin, baby, and the federal government will work all the better for it.
