Another example is allowing the employee preferential access to overtime in the last year, or them exercising unused vacation time as a one-time cash payout on retirement.
The overtime thing is the most galling, since it's generally straight-up theft of government resources. There's no legitimate government purpose to the extra hours. The theft is culturally accepted by government employees because it costs more than garden-variety timecard fraud -- you don't just get to steal the marginal hour's pay, you get to steal X0% of that every year for the rest of your life, automatically. And it becomes culture in these institutions -- you cover for others because you expect someone to cover for you once it is your turn.
> The overtime thing is the most galling, since it's generally straight-up theft of government resources. There's no legitimate government purpose to the extra hours.
That's true in some extreme cases, though the more usual case is simply bias in which employees get assigned legitimate overtime, in which case there is a legitimate government purpose in the extra hours, it's just that the cost to the government of those extra hours is unnecessarily maximized.
Though in either case I wouldn't say either form of overtime spi king is the most galling form of spiking.
The overtime thing is the most galling, since it's generally straight-up theft of government resources. There's no legitimate government purpose to the extra hours. The theft is culturally accepted by government employees because it costs more than garden-variety timecard fraud -- you don't just get to steal the marginal hour's pay, you get to steal X0% of that every year for the rest of your life, automatically. And it becomes culture in these institutions -- you cover for others because you expect someone to cover for you once it is your turn.