The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [100]
We come to produce what the Washington Post aptly calls “the Gross Nothing Product.” George Plimpton, a talented writer and raconteur, is paid $2,000 simply to attend a Washington cocktail party. The Commission on Federal Paperwork found that the federal government pours over $100 billion annually into paperwork, much of it make-work. Chic Parisian fashion houses merchandize their name rather than their own products. “Saint-Laurent recently drew the line at putting its label on automobile tires,” deadpanned the Post.
Lagging productivity and mismanagement—a kind of Gross Nothing Product—knows no borders. Try talking, simultaneously, to four duplicate hotel managers when the air conditioning breaks down in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. Or visit downtown, where stores close all afternoon for five-hour siesta breaks.
“We still have many, too many, cases of absenteeism, latecomings and forced idleness. This is a great evil entailing the loss of millions of man-days.” The speaker? Soviet party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, complaining to the 1976 Central Committee Plenum about their failure to meet the goals of the five-year plan. Communist and Socialist nations—where work is guaranteed, but often at slave pay and with strikes prohibited—have difficulty motivating workers with the promise of a line in the plant newspapers or snappy new titles such as Shock Worker of Communist Labor. Chinese workers in 1977 received their first pay increase since the late fifties—one reason for their factory slowdowns and productivity woes. They, too, suffer from government monopoly. Sensing that their nonincentive system offered insufficient rewards—ours tend to offer insufficient punishment—China’s post-Mao leadership is less a slave to ideology. “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice and is a good cat,” party Vice Chairman and Deputy Prime Minister Teng Hsiao-ping has said.
As government becomes more important in our lives—directly employing 15 million people, consuming one-quarter of America’s GNP—its management and work practices command attention. No, require it. Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee were shocked, for instance, when Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, revealed that his agency employed an additional 980,217 people the Senators did not know about. The Senators were just counting the agency’s 144,256 regular employees. Califano was counting, as well, all those who receive government contracts, research grants and federal salaries while working for state or local governments. “My God, we are over one million!” exclaimed Senator Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina. Yep, and that’s just for HEW. A survey by the Washington Post found that the federal civilian work force, alleged to be 2.9 million, is actually more than twice that when you include those supported by federal dollars. The Defense Department, as another example, has 1 million civilian employees—and another 2,050,000 “outside the walls” who receive their paychecks from Defense. Another 50 million Americans are supported by welfare, Social Security, pensions or public service job programs. Government pervades our lives. At some point, when costs are rising faster than tax receipts and productivity, the economy is retarded. Inflation runs out of control. And everyone pays.
Times have changed. During more perilous crises, the Depression and World War II, New York City policemen suffered fourteen years without a pay raise; city workers, led by fiery Fiorello LaGuardia, accepted an extension of the work week from forty to forty-eight hours. Labor Commissioner Anthony Russo well remembers the Depression. He began working for the city as a $840 a year clerk in 1935. In 1977, at the age of fifty-nine, he was eligible to retire on a pension exceeding his $47,093 salary. But this man who had risen to the top of the civil service to