Working for the Government -part two

 A few years ago I was employed as a temp to enter all the flood defence data on to the National Flood Defence database. I've explained how I was recruited at short notice from a local employment agency, despite the fact that the EA had contracted with Reed International to supply all their temporary staff. I also explained how unworkable and unsatisfactory the arrangement was, as Reed offices are usually in a different town to where the job was situated, meaning that local staff were unlikely to be given the job.
I was employed on minimum wage and I had no spare time or money to travel to another town to register for work (at minimum wage). In reality the national minimum wage is also the national maximum wage. You can't run a household and a car on minimum wage, so having a national agreement in place is the worst possible option when trying to get people back into work and getting work done and meeting your own targets.
Reed had to take up my references, but I argued that I was already working at the EA anyway, and had been for some weeks, so why shouldn't I continue to work there? Then there was the small matter of the deadline for uploading all the data, the reason why I was engaged in the first place.
So I went back to work at the EA while my references were checked out. In the meantime the agency had sent a new temp along to help. He was considered the very best they could find. He was useless, but then I was biased. However, he was unable to match our work rate even after a couple of day's training. As I said, the job required tenacity, accuracy and intense concentration and my co-worker was sadly lacking. It didn't help that he lived miles and miles away and his transport was unreliable.
(Back to the same problem of paying minimum wage. There's no money for keeping your car up to scratch. Yet another disincentive to work.)
As the days passed, we began to see the light. The pile of work slowly began to diminish. We were going to upload all the data in the time required. My boss rang around the neighbouring regions to see how they were doing. Their answer astounded me.


No they hadn't made much progress in getting the data online. No they weren't making any special effort. Yes they were going to miss the deadline set by the government. No they had no intention of meeting it at any time soon.


So much for government targets.


I now began to see how the public sector works. I began to see that setting targets is unproductive, costly and gives a totally false picture of what is actually happening.

Basically there are three options.

One is to stop doing your normal work and divert all your resources to producing the evidence required by central government that you are hitting your targets.
In the case of my little backwater of the EA, it would have meant taking all the field satff off the job of repairing and improving flood defences and sitting them in an office entering the data on to the computer. Data which is basically useless in the event of a flood. Flood defences are what's needed, not lines on a map.
Option one is the one favoured by someone looking for promotion. Look good in the eyes of Head Office and bugger the workers and the public.  Produce glossy plans and charts that look good but betray the reality.

Option two was to continue to work on the flood defences, utilising the staff according to their strengths, and updating the data as and when time allowed. This also creates a false picture of the situation, but in a positive way. The defences are probably better than as marked on a plan. This is not the way to go if you want promotion.

Option three is to bring in people to update the data while the regular staff do the job they were hired to do. The problem with this approach is that the quality of staff is variable, the training patchy, and the rush to hit the deadline outweighs the need to enter the data correctly. It's also very expensive.

And the final option, one that is used over and over again. In my office there were a couple of men who were working on technical drawings for various flood defences. They worked on a draughtsman's table producing plans in the old fashioned way. I chatted to one when I had a break one day. He used to work for the EA or one of its predecessors but had been made redundant when the EA was re-organised. The re-organisation left them without anyone to make the deatiled drawings that are vital for any work to be done. What did they do? they re-hired the draughtsman, this time as a consultant at a vastly inflated daily rate. So he came back, sat at the same desk and did exactly the same job as he did before, but this time with a big smile on his face. He was his own boss, earning a fortune compared to his earlier salary, and if he fancied a day off he could take it. Nice work if you can get it.

We made the deadline. We were the only office in the whole of the UK to do so.
We were the only office to hit the government's target.
Guess which office got into trouble?

Anyway, my job was done. I heard that another department needed a temporary worker so i approached them and found myself work to last another three weeks or so.

Reed International. Useless. I'd never recommend them to anyone.

Deadlines

Looking back I've realised that the jobs that involved working to tight deadlines gave me the most satisfaction. The best jobs are the ones where you can look back at the end of the day and see how much (or little) you've achieved. They can be looked upon as little victories (or defeats). They make the job more interesting.

I've written in previous posts about the deadlines we worked to in the bank. I also worked to tight deadlines when pricing up invoices at a frozen food company. I've worked at places where deadlines were non-existent or so lax as to be worthless. Those tended to be the jobs I hated. I'd find myself staring out of the window rather than doing my work, and getting bored by the minute.

Is it the protestant work ethic? Does the devil make work for idle hands? Is work actually good for us? I've been unemployed a few times over the years and I have to say I prefer to have a job, even a bad one. Just the act of getting out of bed and going to work gives structure to the day.
Having a job with an easily understood set of objectives set against a structure that has built in deadlines makes the day go quicker. If the working day goes quicker, then the evenings and leisure time come that much quicker too.

In the early seventies I worked inthe sales office at Telfers in Cadby Hall, West London. It was just along from Olympia and within a fifteen minute walk from my flat in Shepherds Bush.
There were three of us responsible for answering the phones and taking orders for pies, sausages and burgers that found their way into almost every chip shop in London, and every works canteen across half the country. Briefly, a customer would ring up and order his requirements for the next day's delivery. Our job was to take his order down, allocate it to the correct van salesman, and ensure that enough product was manufactured in the factories. One factory was in Cadby Hall and the other in Stratford, East London. We'd place a preliminary order by ten in the morning based on previous sales and whether it was raining or not (and other factors, like how much stock we were carrying from the previous day). As the day progressed, the pressure increased. There was a deadline for the customers to ring their order in, and the phone calls got more frantic as the deadline loomed. There was another deadline to order the goods from the factory. In between those times there was half an hour when all the loadsheets and spreadsheets had to be added up and cross balanced. And all done without computers.

The days would fly by. At that time I was playing mandolin in a traditional Irish folk group collective. The lineup of the group fluctuated according to whoever was available, from a basic five piece up to fifteen or so. It was loose and tight at the same time. We played pubs all over West London and at one stage played every night except Mondays, and twice on Sundays, all in different venues. It was great while it lasted.

It ended when Telfers decided to move out of Cadby Hall. The sales depot moved to Isleworth and production to Northampton. I didn't fancy commuting to Isleworth from Shepherds Bush, and there were brand new houses available to anyone who relocated to Northampton.
We were paying £8.50 a week for a grotty two room bedsit with a leaky roof and shared bathroom and no heating. They were offering a brand new three bedroomed terrace house with central heating for the same weekly rental.
No contest.
It was just that the job I took was shite.