Comment by stackghost
18 hours ago
The military is like this. Higher Headquarters decides to contract out maintenance and logistical support for $aircraft_fleet. Uniformed maintainers go home in Friday and show up Monday making a lot more money to do the same job but without risk of getting posted or deployed.
Contractor fees come out because of a different pot of money, so perverse incentives abound.
This is almost formalized in UK trains under TUPE. Train companies like Avanti exist as shells; they don't own track, trains, or stations, and when the franchise shifts to a different company the vast majority of the staff are taken on. Because - guess what - they're the people who can do the job and are in the right place.
Someone called this form of privatization accounting "playing at shops". It is slowly coming to an end as they are re-nationalized.
Don’t those uniformed maintainers get reassigned to other military jobs or are they allowed to work as a contractor while being active military?
Yes, GP's description is incorrect (to be kind, it's just bullshit). If the position is removed (say H-60 maintenance at some base is now contracted out) then the enlisted members doing the work would not switch to contractors over the weekend or even over the span of a few weeks, they'd be moved to another base or another job on the same base.
Now, the people being hired by the contractors are often former enlisted maintainers, but it won't be the ones doing the job previously because of a switchover like this. Those crews will have PCS'd.
Sometimes they do but often they quit because the work life balance is much better.
If you’re enlisted (or even commissioned in most cases), you quite literally don’t get to quit.
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They're dismissed due to a reduction in force.
That’s pretty rare in the USAF. Most servicemembers will be sent to be retrained on a different airframe or even into a different career field unless their date of separation doesn’t make it worth it. Voluntary separation programs do sometimes pop up but they’re not that common.
It is common to have people separating and coming back immediately as contractors into basically the same job, but that’s usually because there is already a contracted workforce in place and they made connections while serving.
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s/in Friday/on Friday/g