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Anecdote here.
We Americans cannot be topped in our capacity to fleece the taxpayer.
I witnessed one such act on summer vacation and marveled at its creativity and simplicity. No double books or fake service orders needed, just a coffee mug and a laptop. When a mug bearing the logo of a Maine campground is placed in the middle of a keyboard just so — handle facing in, screen tilted back — the letter “h” will appear in a Microsoft Word document, and be typed non-stop for the next eight hours. The federal contractor’s work avatar will remain green, suggesting that she is online. She does not have to take a vacation day. Uncle Sam will be billed accordingly.
All that effort — from the careful placement of the mug to the vigilance required to shoo children away from the keyboard — may have been unnecessary. An internal audit obtained by Washington Free Beacon investigative reporter Patrick Hauf revealed that an estimated 25 percent of workers at one federal agency did not open their email or department software in the first nine months of the pandemic. The agency in question was, unfortunately, the Department of Health and Human Services, which ostensibly “leads the federal public health and medical response during public health emergencies.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-workers-have-gotten-way-less-productive-no-one-is-sure-why/ar-AA13zbIT
In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work, leading some economists to suggest that the pandemic might spark longer-term growth. It also raises new questions about the shift to hybrid schedules and remote work, as employees have made the case that flexibility helped them work more efficiently. And it comes at a time when “quiet quitting” — doing only what’s expected and no more — is resonating, especially with younger workers.
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