It was a good week to be on a government payroll and a bad one to be paying for it. Here are a few of the most absurd stories from the last several days in case you missed them.
Too tired to go to work? The Australian government has your back!
Michele Duffy, 63, advises students at Victoria University in Melbourne. She asked to work from home two days a week to cut the “physical fatigue” of commuting. She has no medical condition precluding her from going to work in person; she just doesn’t feel like it.
Her employer, the university, disagreed. Her job is dealing with students face to face, and somebody has to be at the desk when they walk in.
Finally Ms. Duffy’s manager offered that she could work from home one day per week, on Fridays, the quietest day.
That wasn’t good enough for Duffy. So she took the university to the Fair Work Commission, Australia’s workplace tribunal. Since 2023, the tribunal can overrule employers who turn down such flexible-work requests.
The tribunal agreed the university was within its rights to refuse Duffy’s request… but then ordered them to comply regardless.
“I do not consider that it was necessary for Ms. Duffy to establish that there was a medical reason [for her to stay home],” the commissioner of the tribunal wrote.
The next logical step in this slippery slope is employees who can demand to be paid when they don’t feel like working at all!
One man, five government salaries, and nobody noticed for three years
Speaking of shamming at work, Kashim Chowdhury, 55, went on trial in London this week, accused of holding five full-time government jobs at once.
Over three years, prosecutors say, he worked his way through eight employers in a chain of overlapping government jobs, among them an east London council, the Home Office, the environment department, the UK Health Security Agency and the Department of Health.
All of these were work-from-home jobs; the man claimed he needed to work from home to look after his sick mother.
At the peak, in 2023, he was drawing five full-time salaries at the same time.
His managers rated his work “largely ineffective” and “exceptionally poor”. Yet he was never fired and the paychecks kept coming.
Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable to be exceptionally poor at your job if you work for the British government.
The only reason he finally got caught is because a government data-matching exercise called the National Fraud Initiative flagged his name… not because any of his managers did the obviously right thing and fired him.
Clearly if one man could hold five of those jobs at once, do all of them badly, and go three years without anyone noticing, then none of those jobs needed doing in the first place.
Update: California’s bullet train money went to a tiki bar
If Britain looks bad for paying the same guy to do multiple jobs, California really raises the bar of incompetence and largess.
I recently went through where the first $15 billion of money for California’s non-existent bullet train went. What I couldn’t work out was why nobody had audited any of it. The inspector general, whose job that is, said his office was half-staffed. Now he has found the time to read the consultants’ expense claims.
On September 15 he reported that four consulting firms, the accounting firm KPMG among them, had billed about $600,000 in travel that state rules or their own contracts didn’t allow. That was more than half of everything he looked at. The claims included first-class flights and car rides to a night club until 2:30 in the morning, a cigar lounge in Washington, DC, a tiki bar and an escape room.
One legal consultant billed for about 30 trips between Denver and Sacramento in a year: $40,800 in travel costs, plus $86,500 in billable hours for the time he spent getting there. That is roughly $4,000 a trip before he did any legal work.
Voters approved this train in 2008 for $33 billion, with service by 2020. The current estimate is that it will cost up to $231 billion and be finished by 2040.
$26,450 per student, and 62% of them still can’t do math
And while we’re talking about California, the state released its annual test results on Thursday under the headline “New Statewide Data Shows Continued Progress for California Students.”
Progress??? Their own report shows only 49% of students met the state’s basic English standard, and just 38% met the math standard. Both are still below 2019. Among low-income students, 61% fell short in English and 73% in math.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s statement called the results “important evidence that our sustained investments are making a difference.”
Here are the investments, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the legislature’s nonpartisan budget staff: about $143 billion on K-12 schools in the year these tests were taken, roughly $26,450 per student.
The state’s answer is to spend 7% more this year, about $28,250 per student.
It’s a great plan! When has spending more money ever failed to produce solid results in California?
