THE COALITION TO SAVE OUR MILITARY SHOPPING BENEFITS
Commissaries Affected By Hiring Freezes and Furloughs
May 15, 2013 at 8:00am
In order to cope with crippling cuts to the current budget and a Department of Defense (DoD) hiring freeze, the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) – which manages 252 commissaries worldwide – stopped hiring replacement workers, leaving gaps in commissary operations. As a result, some stores have been operating at less than 70 percent of the required workforce, threatening store hours and product availability.
Last week, Patrick Nixon, President of the American Logistics Association and The Coalition to Save Our Military Shopping Benefits highlighted the hiring freeze issue in an interview with syndicated columnist Tom Philpott. Today, we learned that DeCA has received authority to hire at commissaries operating below 90 percent workforce capacity. Although this is a good step forward, commissaries must still operate with 10 percent less workforce for the foreseeable future, which is why we remain concerned with the ongoing effects of the hiring freeze.
In addition to the hiring freeze, the Secretary of Defense announced today that due to sequestration the Pentagon will furlough nearly 680,000 civilian employees for up to 11 days – half of the 22 days originally planned. Furlough notices are expected to go out between May 28 and June 5 with furloughs beginning on July 8th – at the rate of one furlough day per week – through the end of the current fiscal year ending September 30, 2013.
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