SECDEF to DoD Civilians: You’re Getting 11 Unpaid Days Off
The SECDEF has announced DoD’s decision on civilian furloughs this afternoon. That announcement directs a total of 11 unpaid days off for most of the DoD civilian workforce (650,000 of 750,000 civilian employees will be affected) between now and 30 September 2013. Furloughs will begin the week of 8 July 2013, with one unpaid day off per week. They may end earlier than the end of September if financial conditions allow.
Sequestration, of course, is the reason.
The financial savings will not be inconsequential. The exact dollar amount isn’t easy to calculate quickly. But making an assumption or two, we can come up with what should be a reasonable, “ballpark” estimate.
Eleven workdays equates to 88 paid hours per employee. Since the furloughs will affect 650,000 civilian employees, that will save salary and benefits costs associated with 57,200,000 staff-hours.
Benefits costs typically add between 1/3 and 1/2 to the cost of hourly wages. Let’s be conservative and use 1/2 to get a “worst case” number.
Determining the average hourly wage across all affected DoD employees would be difficult. So let’s assume that averages out to an hourly rate of somewhere in the mid-GS12 ramge. This is probably too high – but we need to use something. It will at least be “in the ballpark”.
Doing the math, that works out to a savings of about $3,260,400,000
No, that’s not chump change. But to put it in perspective: that’s also not much over 0.6% of this year’s DoD 2013 base budget – and less than 0.5% of DoD’s 2013 total outlays, when contingency operation supplemental appropriations and other outlays are counted.
But we should count our blessings. Uncle Sam still has plenty of money to pay for really nice hotels when the POTUS or Vice President travel. Or to fly the Vice President that 110 miles or so between DC and Wilmington, DE of AF-2 most weekends.
Maybe you don’t want to mention that fact to any of the folks who’ll be directly affected by the furlough, though. Since the furloughs will be imposed on a 1-day-per-workweek basis, those individuals will be seeing a 20+% cut in take-home pay for 11 weeks. That might affect their outlook, attitude, and sense of humor just a bit.
Category: Economy, Military issues
I wonder how/if this touches state DMVA employees, if at all? I think most of our techs/civilians are on the state dole, but our state AG has said that sequestration would do horrible things to these guys, too.
all those DoD civilians are worthless, they should get rid of all of them.
Hondo, I meant if we don’t get a Ryanesque painful plan in place in soon we are indeed dead….I think we can recover but we do need to do some painful alterations to the nature of our government.
I am unconvinced our current leaders are strong enough to self throttle their spendthrift ways. With a weak electorate unwilling to support strong leaders and instead favoring weak minded fools who offer endless handouts from rent to phones, I suspect you are right about the future which saddens me greatly.
“Some of us look at this more simplistically – if a job is not “essential,” then it should be eliminated. There is no excuse for us having anyone on the payroll that is anything other than essential.” Inevitably, one must ask whether a loss of two days per pay period couldn’t allow for three or four or five or all. It is difficult for people who depend on gov’t job household income to look at this stuff dispassionately. But, truth be told, many hardworking gov’t employees know in their heart of hearts that their office could jettison some number of their fellow employees without a drop in production. In fact, production might increase as a result of the morale boost.
@54 private sector companies have had to embrace lean manufacturing for more than a decade if they have any intention of surviving in our current economy. Several small manufacturing (small meaning 10-25 million in gross sales) that had departments where more than a dozen employees performed pre-manufacturing prep work have seen those departments reduced to less than a half dozen employees because labor is the most expensive part of the process.
Additionally some processes like printing which at one time saw regular net (post-tax) returns in the 20-30% range have become such a commodity item that the national average profit is less than 5% net…meaning your sales of 25 million dollars doesn’t generate enough profit to buy new printing presses which cost 3-5 years worth of 5% profits. Automation to further reduce the workforce is an ongoing proposition in this industry as well as many others.
When it’s cheaper to use humans in a labor intensive process to make a piece of steel, print and fulfill packaging, sew a piece of clothing 15,000 miles away from an automated factory and then ship it back to where the automated factory is for sale, you are in trouble. Because you can’t produce anything that those 15,000 miles away can afford, thus creating a constant trade deficit with the resulting economic implications that brings to your nation.
We have not reached 3rd world wealth gaps between the middle class and the wealthiest in our nation yet, but we are doing our level best to get there. Thank you Democrats and Republicans for lining your pockets at the expense of the greatest nation the world has ever known….our enemies couldn’t break us down as nicely as you traitorous rat b4stards have done.
52 – The Dude, good comedy….too bad it went unnoticed.
Hondo – Thanks for posting the information. I forgot to mention that first responders usually dont get furloughed. They use to consider us, Command and Control first responders so they ignored us. But Commander put us on the furlough list this year. So we are Shit out of luck.
The way the email notification you receive for Furlough warning is comical. Stating “Sorry but had to come to this…” along with “If you need any financial help, go to Military OneSource for help on financial matters”, it just seems so impersonal.
Truth is, the furlough has little to do with TRULY saving moeny, and more to do with hurting people.
I don’t work for DoD. I work for a state agency. The first biennium we had furloughs, it ended up COSTING the state money. So we figured the next biennium the legislature would wise up and figure another way to save money. Nope. They went back to that well and hooked us up with another two years of furloughs. That period is set to run out (we’re taking our last slated furlough this month) and we’re waiting to see if they hit us with another two years of it.
I’m getting set to retire from DoD in Sep. I won’t mind the three day weekends one bit.