Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Down and Out in the Homeland

Morale has gotten so bad over at DHS, they should probably make the initials stand for Depressed Hacky-Sacks.

Jeh Johnson, chief of the Department of Homeland Security, says he is very dejected about the low happiness scores of his minions, who scored the lowest of the low in job satisfaction among all federal government agencies. He has therefore announced a brand new initiative designed to instill some gladness into his airport gropers as well as putting all that lost disaster fun back into FEMA.




Only half the DHS workers surveyed scored well in the "engagement" category, with about the same percentage proclaiming themselves less than "globally satisfied." This is 10 percent lower than 2010's globally satisfied engagement scores. 

Do you suspect that the low scores might have as much to do with respondents not knowing what the hell these questions even mean as with how happy they are making $10 an hour patting down passengers in Airport Security Theater?  Do you ever even have the time to stop and ponder about how engaged and globally satisfied you are as you schlep through your own crappy job?

The Washington Post has the whole sorry scoop:
Even worse, DHS fell 1 percent in both categories this year, despite a frenzy of morale-boosting efforts including an employee steering committee dedicated to fairness in hiring and promotions, enhanced employee training programs and Johnson’s department-wide “Unity of Effort” initiative, designed to tackle the department’s management challenges. DHS’s struggles with employee morale date back to its creation during the George W. Bush administration, when 22 autonomous agencies were plucked from across the government and welded into one department.
That pretty much explains the morale issues. Who wouldn't be disgruntled after being plucked like a free-range chicken and then welded into one hot stinking cage on a factory farm? The CIA is not the only agency that knows how to "torture some folks." I suppose that we, the public, can at least gain some satisfaction knowing that the fine folks spying on our Occupy protests from their DHS fusion centers feel as miserable and down and out as the rest of us. Maybe they should just join us after they finish beating us. 

Maybe their global satisfaction scores will improve if Jeh Johnson gives them cuddly global hacky-sacks to kick around during breaks from operating their Rapiscan machines at the airport.



Better yet, Congress might disband Homeland Security, declare the War on Terror over, take its multi-billion dollar budget and reallocate it for health care, education and infrastructure. Sad DHS workers would get retrained for other jobs -- say, as teachers and nurses and architects and construction workers.

But Jeh Johnson apparently likes his own job title, and is not giving up. The Boss is going to shove the morale down their throats whether they like it or not:
Johnson, who took over the sprawling domestic security agency in December 2013, pronounced himself “disappointed that our efforts to improve employee satisfaction at DHS were not reflected Department-wide in this year’s results of the Federal Employee Viewpoint survey. ”But the former Pentagon General Counsel said he was “not discouraged.” In a public statement and a department-wide email, he told employees that he and Deputy DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “will not give up.  We know that improving employee satisfaction across a 22-component, 240,000-person department takes time. ”
He proudly noted, moreover, that the people working in his own office are 85 percent globally satisfied with their jobs. Their jobs depend upon their satisfaction. Jeh Johnson is not about to allow any sad-sack hacks within an inch of his own joyful presence.



5 comments:

voice-in-wilderness said...

I expect most reading Karen's commentary were thinking of the classic line, that the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Jay–Ottawa said...

ISIS is good for business, Department of Homeland Security business, that is. It should be obvious by now that a big terrorist threat over there demands a big counterterrorist effort over here. Order more blue shirts and black pants, mostly large and XX large to judge by the picture above.

I deeply resent Putin's surprise move reported in the morning's headlines. He's sending his air force to Assad's aid in Syria to bomb the hell out of ISIS. Yes, it's nice to see NATO and the Russians working side by side. But let's hope Putin's top guns pull their punches so Jeh (pronounced 'Jay,' by the way) won't suffer a diminution of funding for his DHS.

Then again, maybe we should ask Vlad to send another squadron to Afghanistan to help the multi-billion dollar American-trained Afghan Army clear the skies of the Taliban air force and retake Kunduz.

Jay–Ottawa said...

Cool. Glenn Greenwald just posted something along the same lines as my comment above. What a copycat! In the process he also maligned President Obama, our peace loving peace prizer.

"Whatever else one wants to say about Iraq and Afghanistan, one cannot honestly say that Obama ended the wars in those countries. The U.S. continues to drop bombs on both, deploys soldiers in both, kills civilians in both, and engages in a wide range of overt and covert force, all without a shred of Congressional approval."

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/30/u-s-bombs-somehow-keep-falling-in-the-places-where-obama-boasts-he-ended-wars/?comments=1#comments

Karen Garcia said...

Quick note:

The site was inundated by scores of published spam comments bypassing the spam filter overnight (they seem to have originated in Ukraine), so I have had to turn on the moderation gizmo for the time being. There will thus be a delay in publishing your comments, so please don't keep submitting them. I'll be checking in at frequent intervals to ensure that your comment gets posted in as timely a manner as possible. Comments submitted overnight will have to wait until the a.m. when I get up to read them.

I apologize for the inconvenience. Hopefully this situation will be temporary.

Karen Garcia said...

Comments update:

No spam in past 24 hours, so I have restored your ability to post comments without moderation. Fingers crossed that this is the end of it.