Slashdot Mirror
Federal Contractors Are $600 Screwdrivers
ideonexus writes "Last month an article appeared on Slashdot about how the government pays IT contractors twice what it pays its own workers. Missing from the article was how much the IT contractor pays its own workers. After working for a federal contractor for 10 years, a document accidentally leaked to employees by the contractor illustrated the incredible disparity between what the contractor was paying us and what they were charging the government. Like most contracts according to the GAO, the government provided our offices, utilities, computers, and training, leaving our salaries as the only overhead to the IT contractor, giving them an incredible incentive to keep them as low as possible to maximize profits. When the top 100 defense contractors cost taxpayers $306 billion, eliminating the federal contractor middle-man seems like an obvious place to start the austerity measures."
Well, if unions in the USA are as powerful as The Incredible Hulk, they must be doing a really sloppy job. After all, you're among the countries with the highest income inequality among developed nations. And it keeps rising.
I suspect this anti-union rhetoric that floods Slashdot all the time is more a product of decades of brainwashing from the part of the corporate media propaganda machine.
In my country (Portugal), unions are pretty weak. That's one of the reasons (but not the only, mind you) we have incredibly shitty pay compared to countries where unions are powerful like Germany and France. And it hasn't helped us at all to have weak unions. Our productivity is still very low, although we work more hours than the other Europeans. Our country is bankrupt. And our managing class is one of the most illiterate, lazy, loutish and well-paid in Europe.