RFP

You may not know that I’m a government contractor. Well, our contract is up this year, which means it will be re-bid, a process that is both worrisome and terrifying.

In past years it has been interesting, too, and a little exciting, but with the economy the way it is, and with Obama looking really hard at government spending (and adult training/education is soooo hard to quantify with statistics to see how well it’s working), I’m worried. Oh, and 5 years ago they cut a position from our contract, something that threw us all on our collective ears.

What will basically happen is sometime this spring our Request for Proposals (RFP) will ‘hit the streets’ and there will be a deadline by which companies can bid on our contract. Bids will be evaluated and ranked, and the lowest bid will win. The ranking, etc, can take a couple weeks or a few months. The new contract will take effect October 1, 2009.

What has really screwed us in the past 5 years is that we’ve been level-funded, which means we have the same amount of money put aside for our contract this year as we did 5 years ago, with no wiggle room for the rising expenses of healthcare, administrative stuff, or anything else. If we continue to be level funded in the next few years we could loose our healthcare benefits, as happened the last time the Security contract came up. This would leave our 5 single employees here without healthcare options. The remaining 3 of us could go on our spouse’s insurance.

The best case scenario is that our contract will be funded better, and that we maintain our current company or get another one that is just as good or better. I don’t even want to think of the possibility of a raise (we make very good money here for our area, and I do not complain about it like some of my illustrious coworkers do, but we haven’t had one in several years).

The worst case scenarios include a new and horrible company, losing more personnel, losing benefits, our pay going down (has happened before), working more hours with the same or fewer people, etc. Oh, and possibly not finding out what’s going on until the 11th hour, which would be September 30th, as has happened once before.

The other part is that if we get a new company they can either hire all of us back, hire some of us back, or hire none of us and replace us with an all new staff. As far as I know, the last option has never happened on this campus, and the general consensus is that it probably never will because it would be silly to hire all new people who don’t know the computer system and basic operations of the site, but it is a possibility.

The only new thing that’s really going for us is that we have a new Fed in charge of our contract, and he’s taking us out of the stone age and really starting to make this place shine, so I’m hopeful that they will basically reward us for this.