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By Root 1134 0

become the city’s chief labor negotiator, who lives in a nice house in Flushing, Queens, who was honored as Vice President of the National Public Employee Labor Relations Association, was unhappy. Gazing out the dirty windows of a cluttered downtown office overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, Russo recalled the old days: “Working for the city has totally deteriorated. When I came in, there was a great deal of respect for authority. There were no unions. People worked hard because they felt good. It was a steady job, an opportunity for advancement. There was respect for commissioners. Everyone worked as hard as they could. Everyone was afraid of getting fired. We were residents of the city. This was our town.… Today, to some degree, city employees are mercenaries. They work for a wage. They fear their surroundings, for their safety.… Today, workers want uniformed guards and petitions. They don’t want to go into the field. People spend the day here and go home to the suburbs. There’s no identification with the city, no sense of mission.”

This affliction, and others, are not unique to New York. But New York helps crystallize many of the questions confronting America. Can we inspire worker job satisfaction for routine jobs? How do we win consent for long-term decisions which violate the short-term interests of constituent groups? Do we know how to cope with economic decline? With resources that expand more slowly than our expectations? Will waste and inefficiency rob government of its public support? Do we know how to manage a sprawling government octopus? In this sense, the New York fiscal crisis places democracy on trial.

How do you satisfy constituent groups when there is no more to offer, when the money well is dry? Private industry covers higher costs by passing them on to consumers. New York, already the most heavily taxed city in the nation, cannot pass on taxes without losing more of its tax base. It cannot freely borrow. It can no longer offer more by hiding deficits. Like Israel, it can seek help from the U.S. government but, ultimately, it can only rely on itself. If there is an escape, it can only come from different and better management of scarce resources. To accomplish this task, four broad subjects require attention: management, productivity, civil service, and collective bargaining.

Management

Lee Oberst supposedly knows something about management. When the telephone company was in hot water with consumers in the late sixties, it summoned Oberst to become V.P. of the New York region. Fix it, they told the fifty-one-year-old executive. Fix the lousy service. Stop those protests and investigations. Stop those damn newspaper attacks.

Lee Oberst did. Relying on the street smarts of a kid from the South Bronx who didn’t go by the book because he didn’t go to college, Oberst knew how to fix it. He and other executives neatly divided the management problem into two parts, one dealing with reality, the other with appearance.

Appearance came first. Oberst figured that if pay phones suddenly worked, the public would notice. So he spared no effort to fix them. At the same time, he figured that if journalists were pleased with their own service, they would assume everyone else was. So he pinpointed where key editors and writers lived—mostly in Manhattan—and rushed to improve service in those selected areas. The strategy worked. The protests subsided. The phone company purchased precious time, permitting it to plan to improve its management and the public’s phone service.

Since February 1977, Lee Oberst has been trying to fix the city’s primitive management system. The phone company continues to pay his $120,000 salary, but he’s on loan (till November 1, 1978) and serves as the city’s first director of operations. From their fourteenth-floor, barracks-blue Broadway offices, across from City Hall, Oberst and a staff of thirty on-loan business executives and fifteen civil servants struggle with reality.

And the reality is pretty grim. Everyone has his favorite villains, but the chief culprit of New York’s fiscal crisis