I've mentioned lots of things about work that really are general office issues. Conflicting bosses, fictional deadlines, people who don't know what they're doing, fixing mistakes that shouldn't have been made in the first place - annoying to deal with, but the kind of thing almost everyone in a cubicle has to deal with eventually.
Here's something that I'm pretty sure is unique to working in a government bureaucracy, though: my status as a contractor.
If someone made a TV show of my life and you watched the show with the sound off, you'd never guess that I wasn't a government employee. I've been a technical writer here for about two and a half years, and every day on the job has been in the same government office building. When my security badge is between renewals I have to go through a metal detector to get to work. My job involves editing regulatory documents, mostly related to new public safety requirements or industry standards. This is not a temporary thing or consultancy or on-site troubleshooting; this office is my office, I just get paid by a third party.
So the setting doesn't give any clues that I work for private industry, and neither does almost anything else. On those project teams I mentioned in a previous entry, I'm pretty sure us tech writers are the only people who aren't true government employees. The difference between what we do and what the rest of the team does is generally subtle. We're each focusing on our respective topics - the subject matter expert on what the rulemaking actually does, the economist on the costs of it, the tech writer on plain English and current Federal Register style, and so on - but we're all working in the same document and attending the same meetings and have to ask each other lots of questions to do our own jobs. Us tech writers frequently get reminders by our supervisor (also a contractor) that we can never, ever "jump over the line by... telling the gov't what to do", but every organization has to have someone that's at the bottom of the totem pole, so the fact that it's us doesn't really show anything.
For my first several months here, I thought this was stupid, not that I would look a gift horse in the mouth of course. I have always understood that the theoretical goal of contracting out services was to do things that it wouldn't make sense for the client to do for themselves. For example, expertise you need sometimes, but it's needed too rarely to be worth keeping someone on staff for. Or hiring contractors to take care of things that are necessary but not part of the core mission, like groundskeeping, so that the organization can focus on their real goal. Or a small organization contracting with a much larger one to take advantage of economies of scale they can provide. However, like I said, none of those fit here. Tech writers work on everything, we're an integral part of the process, and there are few organizations bigger than the federal government. So what's the point of being a contractor? I have one supervisor in the building and she has a supervisor who spends a lot of time in the building, although I honestly have no idea where a desk is that he calls his own. What do they do that a government employee couldn't? What do they add to the process but another layer of bureaucracy? What does our contracting company add to the process?
Eventually, I griped about this to a friend who's also a contractor, but with a different company doing a different job. He told me that the advantage of using contractors is that we're easier to fire.
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