Food drive update: Donate the last Friday of each summer month
June 23rd, 2009 | Office of Personnel Management Uncategorized | Posted by Steve Losey
Federal agencies will start collecting food nationwide under the Feds Feed Families program this week, the Office of Personnel Management said. Canned and other unperishable food items will be picked up the last Friday in June, July and August, but agencies will put out cardboard collection bins a few days earlier, OPM Director John Berry and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., said at a press conference at a Northern Virginia food pantry.
OPM itself already has filled the 10 cardboard bins it has at the entrance to its Washington headquarters three times over, Berry said. The government hopes to collect 1 million pounds of food by the end of summer.
OPM launched the food drive because food banks often run low during the summer months, when people are often on vacation and forget to donate. Also, low-income children who are on summer vacation don’t get school lunches or breakfasts and could go hungry, Berry said:
So right when parents need the most help and they turn to the community food banks, unfortunately many of those shelves are getting thin, because the demands in our economic times are tough. [...] Federal employees know how blessed they are. They’ve got good jobs, they’re respected by their nation. This is an opportunity for them to give back to their communities and I know they’re going to step up to this plate.
And Berry said OPM is cooking up a contest to see which agency can donate the most pounds of food per employee, though he hasn’t yet settled on a prize.
OPM plans to track how much food has been donated at the drive’s official Web site, www.fedsfeedfamilies.gov.
Tags: Feds Feed Families, Frank Wolf, John Berry, OPM
Sick leave bill introduced
February 10th, 2009 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Steve Losey
Reps. James Moran, D-Va., and Frank Wolf, R-Va., just reintroduced a bill that would allow employees under the Federal Employees Retirement System to count unused sick leave as time toward their annuities.
The sponsors of the FERS Sick Leave Equity Act, which has not yet been assigned a number, say it will save the government $68 million per year by cutting down on employees’ lost productivity. Because FERS employees currently lose all of their sick leave credit when they leave the government, Moran said many start to suffer from the so-called “FERS flu” as they near retirement:
FERS’ use it or lose it system for sick leave hampers productivity and increases training costs. We need to be incentivizing the accrual of sick leave, not encouraging employees to call in sick in the weeks leading up to retirement.
Congress added an identical benefit for employees under the old Civil Service Retirement System in 1969.
Moran’s office is still trying to line up senators to sponsor their own version of this bill, spokesman Austin Durrer said. A lack of Senate support doomed Moran’s bill last year — it passed the House in July as part of a tobacco bill, but the Senate version contained no such provision.
Tags: FERS, Frank Wolf, James Moran, sick leave