Almost no bureaucrat goes to work all week

Published 6 December 2024 at 12.37

Economy. The trend of working from home has taken tax-funded workplaces by storm. In the United States, only 6 percent of federal employees are on the job full-time, reports the New York Post. And the Swedish Social Insurance Agency is struggling to get its employees to go to work three days a week, according to Publikt.

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In the United States, the problem has been mapped at the federal level by Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who released a report showing that only 6 percent of federal employees work full-time at their workplaces and that nearly a third work entirely remotely.

The report describes how federal office buildings are nearly empty and average only 12 percent occupancy. At the same time, the report gives a number of examples of how remote work leads to inefficiency, laziness and slower processing at the authorities.

In Sweden, several tax-financed workplaces increased the opportunity for their employees to work from home during the pandemic, and since then it has been difficult to get them back to work.

One of those with major problems is the Social Insurance Agency, which after the end of the pandemic was met with union opposition to the employees coming to work at all.

Finally, the authority managed to get the union to agree that the employees would report to work for at least 50 percent of the working time, but since the time was calculated on an annual basis, many employees were given long periods when they could manage the work from home.

On 1 September this year, the authority tightened the rules and required employees to be in the office at least three days each week. But even then there were protests from the union and it is unclear if the rules are being followed.

In the US, Joni Ernst accuses the incumbent Biden administration of allowing inefficiency through all domestic work. She points to high costs of underutilized real estate when many federal buildings are empty or partially unused.

She also highlights examples of abuse such as when an authority alert about bacteria in baby food was ignored for several months and when an employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs who took a viral photo of himself in a bathtub while “working”.

Her report suggests measures such as spreading the federal workforce geographically, imposing requirements on remote work performance and monitor employee work more closely.

Ernst plans to work with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, heads of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to increase efficiency in government administration.