Biden doesn't get enough credit for all the good shit he's spearheaded.
That's because he doesn't parade it to the world. And, frankly, he needs to because he's up against a guy whose smallest achievement is touted as the greatest thing anyone has ever done.
Who says those itty bitty hands aren’t a gift from god? /s
I'd say that's less a small achievement and more a major shame considering how he reacted to the guy who said he had small hands.
On the other hand, he says things like he invented the terms "fake news" and "priming the pump" and brags about it. He obviously didn't even invent those terms.
Meanwhile, Biden isn't even saying that he literally gave millions of people (there are over 4 million federal employees) the largest raise in years. He barely touted the fact that he just pardoned thousands of people with criminal records for using cannabis on federal land and D.C. And he should be mentioning his infrastructure bill at every single opportunity.
Instead he's going for this "Bidenomics" nonsense. People don't know what that means. "I gave millions of people raises and pardoned thousands of people whose only crime was smoking a joint?" People know what that means. People certainly know what "I created a shit ton of jobs with my infrastructure bill and also started fixing our broken infrastructure" means too.
It's really nice to get an increase. During the Obama years there were a lot of federal pay freezes and during the orange idiot years he blamed us for every federal cost overrun. It been rough to work in the public sector for awhile.
That’s a good raise, and the govvies I’ve worked with over the years deserve it.
It’s still far too small to stop the perpetual brain drain from federal agencies to government contractors. It’s going to take a lot more than 5% to keep good people in place when they can double their salary overnight by joining a contractor.
There's a lot more than salary that's keeping me from taking a government job. When Biden was elected I checked for jobs in my field and they all involved moving to DC. No remote work at all.
So even if they paid the same I'd have to move to a very high COL area, or commute some insane distance. And I'd need to buy a whole new wardrobe. But they very much didn't pay the same. And in my current role I already work with a lot of different government agencies and contractors.
That being said, I think giving 2 million people a 5% raise is definitely going to boost poll numbers by easing the collective pinch a bit, and as the child of a former federal worker I can appreciate how significant that is.
There’s a lot more than salary that’s keeping me from taking a government job. When Biden was elected I checked for jobs in my field and they all involved moving to DC. No remote work at all.
I think it's highly dependent on your field. If you work for departments like the IRS, the FBI or the TSA, you could do your job from many possible places because the first two have a lot of field offices and the third is at every commercial airport. I believe this raise also applies to postal workers, who are in every incorporated area in the country.
This makes me curious on if those departments actually hire remote workers often. It appears it’s not often
They are only just piloting remote work programs at this point.
The IRS already has more than 500 posts of duty across the U.S., which give potentially hybrid or remote employees an opportunity to work in-person on days when necessary.
That’s a small fry compared to their near 80k workers
Well, yes. Its hard to investigate something from a distance that's not entirely online or financial. Even then, physical evidence is at a place you'd need to go to. And for police, we do want them in the jurisdictions they're policing.
It's that including locality pay?
As I understand it, it's a 4.7% base level increase, with an additional average of 0.5% across all locality areas. So some will see an actual raise of over 5.2%, some less. But on average, it'll be about 5.2%>
It's not just salary for government workers. We get great benefits and strong unions. Also you know what your going to be making
Health insurance… mother fucking health insurance.
The FEHB is some of the best health insurance there is…. I know folks who are only still doing their fed job to continue access to the great insurance.
And you get to keep it for the rest of your life if you retire. I believe you pay the premium through your annuity.
Strong unions yet it's the president that decides to give a pay raise? I don't know how your union works but over here our raises are included in our collective agreement and the government can't decide to not give them to us...
These raises that make the news are the cost of living adjustments or the COLA. They happen annually at the beginning of the calendar year and are intended to adjust salaries for year over year inflation. It’s not related to any sort of performance or merit based pay increases.
Ok but I'm talking about annual pay increases that are part of the collective agreement and negotiated with the union, not performance or merit pay increases...
Sorry for the delayed response, you do realize that as a government employee or employer is the government, right? It's obnoxious some years but our union fights to make sure our rights are protected. For instance Uber Trump he wanted to institute a ton of anti union things such as I cannot talk to my union rep on government time and property even though the office is located in the building.
I'm a government employee in another country, our pay increases are part of our collective agreement and even if an anti union government is elected they have no choice but to give us the salary increases included in our agreement. Our chief of State has no power to prevent it.
Hell, salaries are one of the most important parts of a collective agreement!
That's fair and it's more steps to other than just the president saying ok, but I have to deal with the system I'm in. It's still better than most other unions in the states. The trump years we only saw like a 2% CoLA which was barely noticable. There needs to be a huge legislative overhaul for real. I'll still take the cheaper health insurance with a great 401k deal in the meantime. I am so frustrated with my country.
Are the unions still strong? When SCOTUS ruled against mandatory membership for public employee unions a few years ago I thought they might take a hit.
The problem is the private sector pays more. We need to pay members of the government better than the private sector to attract the best talent and also make them immune to corruption. There is no reason a congressman’s legislative assistant with a law degree should be making $50,000/year. Obviously, they’re going to cave in and join a lobbying firm paying four times that amount. Same goes for just about any other branch of government.
I'd take a pay cut to work for the government if I didn't have to worry... what? Like every 3 months? I could get furloughed and have trouble making ends meet because some wealthy geriatrics in Congress felt like having a dick measuring contest.
Republicans have long asserted that people employed by private companies are paid significantly less than federal workers.
It's common knowledge that you make more money in the private sector.
And even if they didn't, "they get paid less" isn't an excuse to not pay your people more.
I work for the federal government, and some parts of my department have lost 50%+ of their engineers to Boeing and Blue Origin in the last few years. That is completely unsustainable attrition, and yet our leadership does jack shit to try to increase our compensation (there are ways, but it takes damn near an act of Congress, or more likely, an act of God). And our leaderships atrocious attempts at dealing with the attrition problem are just driving more engineers away.
So to summarize, republicans are anti-federal workforce and are also lying sacks of shit.
I also work for the federal government. So I know that the work that your colleagues are not around anymore to do will ultimately have to get outsourced to Boeing, BO, Raytheon, etc and with all of the acquisition overhead and profits the contractors are building in, it ends up costing the taxpayers more to do the same work. More even than the differential of the salaries that your former colleagues are enjoying.
The work we do doesn't actually get pushed to contractors. Rather, we just keep taking delays and moving deadlines, none of which helps us maintain our national security posture. It has the potential to be a very serious problem.
Your point about the skyrocketing cost to taxpayers is accurate, however.
It depends on what you do. As an example, legal contractors with law degrees/licenses make significantly less than their equivalents on the GS scale. They'd make more at a firm, but law firms don't really contract for the feds.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Federal employees will receive pay raises averaging 5.2 percent — more in some high-salary areas — under an order President Biden signed Thursday that delivers the biggest increase to U.S. government workers since the Carter administration.
It’s 0.6 percentage points higher than last year’s increase, which itself was the highest in two decades, and will take effect in the first full pay period of 2024, starting Jan. 14 for most federal employees.
Most lawmakers have already left Washington for the holidays, signaling the end of the legislative year and allowing Biden to finalize the pay hike with Thursday’s executive order.
The raise is split into two parts — 4.7 percent paid across the board, with the remainder varying according to the local salaries of comparable private-sector jobs.
Federal officials last year approved pay bumps for four new high-expense areas: Fresno-Madera-Hanford in California; Reno-Fernley in Nevada; Rochester-Batavia-Seneca Falls in New York; and Spokane-Spokane Valley-Coeur d’Alene in Washington and Idaho.
Biden has also taken several steps to stamp out — and more recently, prevent — a policy ordered by former president Donald Trump that could have enabled him to fire tens of thousands of federal workers and replace them with loyalists.
The original article contains 723 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Good bot.
Its paywalled, what makes it historic
Joe Biden finalized a 5.2% federal pay raise for many civilian employees for 2024. The highest in over two decades, with the second highest being last year's.
Wasn’t paywalled for me, but I didn’t care to read 10 paragraphs of the same thing so I just skimmed.
Found nothing historical in the article, closest was
The salary hike for the federal civilian workforce of close to 2.2 million people is the heftiest since a 9.1 percent average raise in 1980. It’s 0.6 percentage points higher than last year’s increase, which itself was the highest in two decades, and will take effect in the first full pay period of 2024, starting Jan. 14 for most federal employees.
So I guess it’s historically the second highest amount?
Yeah. Not very historic when inflation surpasses it. Better than nothing though!
Federal Employees at least stay close to the interest increase. Most people get zero increase year after year.
Year over year there's a 17%~ inflation since 2020. Has there been a 17%~ increase in salaries since 2020 as well? No? Then it's not good enough. Better than nothing, but that's still not good enough.
That’s the total inflation since 2020, not year over year. If it were year over year the total inflation would have been about 60%.
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