Vocation with Vacation

Like the turtle, the bureaucrat, hunched up within the comfortable armor plate of civil-service regulations, seldom moves at a pace faster than a lumbering lurch. But head, neck and unwinking eye can zip out with wondrous speed--to snap at a taxpayer, look out a window at a parade, or sip a slow cup of coffee at the nearest Government cafeteria. Last week the Senate heard another little-noted fact about his living habits: he can, and frequently does, enjoy the equivalent of about ten weeks of paid vacation a year.

Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas--a rare animal himself, being an economy-minded Fair Dealer--proved it with simple arithmetic. Federal law grants some 1,500,000 Government employees 26 working days of paid "vacation leave," plus 15 days of paid sick leave, plus eight national holidays. This totals 49 working days off, which, when divided by the five-day Government work week, equals just one day less than ten weeks. He hadn't even counted the average four days off each year granted Washington workers because of midsummer heat or Government ceremony.

And if you wanted to figure the 30-minute daily coffee time, you could bring the total working hours of a civil-service employee down to 1,585 a year, as compared with the 1,900 hours "considered a very liberal standard in private industry," Douglas said. (In actual practice, he added, the civil-service average was around 1,650 hours.)

Many Government workers--postal employees, for example--do not get such handsome treatment, he pointed out. His proposal: the Government could save $100 million annually without cutting a single essential service by scaling civil-service vacations down to 20 working days a year and cutting paid sick leave to twelve working days. When the Senate voted it down 57 to 14 (primarily because he had awkwardly tried to tack on his plan as an amendment to an appropriation bill), he braved the scowls of civil servants lurking on the edges of the chamber, promised to keep trying.

Last week the Senate also:

P: Agreed to rescue the controversial displaced-persons law from the smothering wing of Nevada's Pat McCarran, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, for a vote early next month.

The House:

P: Pigeonholed in the House Rules Committee the Senate-approved Lodge-Gossett constitutional amendment to change the system of counting electoral votes in presidential elections (TIME, Feb. 13). P: Voted to make Hawaii a state (having already endorsed statehood for Alaska), sent the bill to the Senate where a similar proposal had been shelved three years ago.

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