Finding efficiencies in the system and the future of ACES mainframe

Until our glitch is figured out for making new posts, please feel free to comment here regarding ACES suggestions and ideas for making it better. We all know it's not the best system in the world, how can we make it work more efficiently? Thank you, David, for this subject line.

FSS Dual Pay Interpreter Issues

I am hearing lots of discussion around the role of the FSS translators. Such as--if stats continue to increase as a management focus, what impact will that have on a worker who needs to help their co-workers on translating a letter sent from the client, or talk to a client in the lobby, or help with a phone call.

If you are an FSS and have the extra 5%, what is your view? We also hear each region and each district use your time differently. Can you help us understand the world from your view?

Are there ways this program and your work could be improved? Do you have concerns on how your time is used?

Help! I can't keep up with the workload!

DSHS is experiencing historic increases in applications for benefits. How is it affecting you?

We have significant concerns with workload. We're seeing employees asked to see too many clients, take too many calls, and in general just asked to do too much. Is management concerned about how much overtime this is going to cause?

What's the experience you're having at your worksite?

Why we should care about the reorganization:

This being one of the first few days of our (hopefully brilliant) blog's existence, I want to take the opportunity to introduce a topic that I think is central to our decision making over the next few months- Will this new service delivery model work? If not, then what will happen to us. If it does work, what will that mean?

The union's main job is to ensure that the people it represents all have the best pay, rights, and working conditions possible. We all agree on that much, but still, shouldn't we worry about the prospect that the new system will be worse than the current one? Think, for instance, of what would happen to the average FSS ( or WFPS, CSS, SW2, etc) if the reorganization fails and is widely perceived as a failure by the public. Not only would our jobs become more stressful, but more employee's would be disciplined, fired, injured on the job and so on. The public would, of course, blame us and by extension our union, and we would lose ground in Washington's politics because of it.

So we should try and make sure CSD works, and we should try to convince our leadership to do what makes sense to make it work too, right? Having said that, shouldn't we ask ourselves what would happen if this thing works great? In other words, do we want the FSS job class to be a phone center based job class?

Typically, way they evaluate your salary depends on what other people who do the same work in other parts of the economy are paid. I wonder what other phone center employee's are paid, and if we wouldn't rather be compared to "case managers" or "financial specialists." We may not want to become disconnected from the communities we serve, either. For many workers, the people they serve, and the satisfaction they get out of helping them, are the reasons that they get up in the morning. There is something sad in the march toward automation, something is lost, and we may not be gaining much in return.

I frequently wonder what the average FSS worker thinks about all this stuff. My fondest hope for this blog is that we might be able to come to some consensus on this subject, along with a few others that I won't get into here. So what's up FSS people? Is this change good for us or bad, and should we go with the flow or not?