You have that relationship reversed.

If you work for the FBI you can quit at any time and work for a different companies with different rules. You can’t work for a company that gets to ignore minimum wage laws.

this all makes sense of course, I am not forced to stay at the FBI. however, I just might:

- love what I do and love the team I am on a my mission.

- have a career at fbi, not a “job” I am willing to change like underwear

- be gs-15 few years away from retirement/pension/…

you can technically say this is a “free” country and all that but it is just semantics

You don’t lose a pension when you quit, you simply qualify for fewer years served.

A career extends beyond a job means that you can transition to something related outside the FBI. If there some aspect of a job you dislike then quit.

we can go glass-half-full-glass-half-empty back and forth ad nausem here for sure :)

bottom line though, the then government (which is soon to be now government) went full ballistic on us during COVID times and vaccine mandates affected many lives

Only some parts of the government “required” their employees to get vaccinated, the entire US government didn’t. Even those bits only hit ~98% compliance.

When you volunteer to work for someone you’re agreeing to do what they want or quit, that’s by definition a choice. When many private employers had the same requirements complaining about overreach by the government is misplaced, it’s at most overreach by employers.

“only” 98% compliance should tell you all you need to know whether people are “forced” or not… the prospect of losing your job might not be that alarming for HN-average-person but…

You can hit 100% compliance by actually firing people. 98% means lot’s of scary memo’s and little action.

So yea 98% says a lot about how toothless this all was.