The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [111]
The report landed on page 1, prompting Mayor Lindsay to disown it. It was bad politics to appear to side with those favoring a return to “politics” and bossism. A similar reception greeted a 1970 report from the National Civil Service League. “Many of the methods by which governments have contrived to assure merit employment and protect the service against past abuses,” declared these long time advocates of civil service, “have also served to exclude many well-qualified persons, severely limit the flexibility of responsible public officials, and curtail the overall effectiveness of the public service.” Consumer advocate Ralph Nader lent his voice as well. In the introduction to The Spoiled System by Robert Vaughn, Nader wrote of the civil service as if it were a basic consumer issue: “These vested interests include the security of tenure, the security of inevitable promotion, the security of habit, the security of sloth, and the unfettered right to stifle dissent within the ranks and block evaluation of performance from outside, whether by the public or by other governmental bodies.”
People collect civil service horror stories. The city’s Director of Pharmacy, the Productivity Council report said, must be drawn from the principal pharmacists’ list. Yet the exam does not test administrative competence—the primary skill required in the job. The first deputy of one city department explained his current predicament: “We are stuck with an accountants’ list for an entrance-level accountant which is three years old. Many people are on that list who cannot read English. We have a need for accountants, but we simply cannot use that list.” He had the same problem finding auditors: “It’s a different skill from accounting, so we’re trying to set up a different exam for auditors from that given accountants. I’m going crazy. The Civil Service people’s desire is to have the lowest possible number of exams.” His desire was to find a good auditor.
His greatest frustration, moans Frank Arricale, then Personnel Director of the Board of Education, is the hiring of teachers. “The overwhelming majority of teachers, perhaps 85 or 90 percent of them, are sent at random to districts on the basis of rank order or seniority,” he says. “If a district needs twenty-five teachers, the first twenty-five on the list are sent to that district. The district has no input. A mark on an exam and when you took the exam determine where and when you go. The reason behind the system is to eliminate political and racial patronage. But it takes away from the district superintendent and the principal any input into staff selection. We’re wedded to a system where someone with a 98.5 score is hired ahead of someone who scored 98.4. If there were fifteen slots and one of them was for a teacher with a music background but none of the first fifteen teachers on the list had a music background, you couldn’t choose a person with such a background even if that person was sixteenth on the list.”
The state system’s rigidity is demonstrated by the case of Joseph K., a state employee requesting anonymity. In 1975, his agency offered him a higher level supervisory position in Albany, 100 miles from where he lived and worked. It was a promotion, sort of. Joseph’s salary was not raised from the $15,500 he was making because no civil service title existed for the new job. And he had to commute 200 miles a day, peeling on and off the heavy leg braces he had worn since a childhood polio attack. Still, Joseph was honored, and happy.
Then the state Civil Service Commission got in the act. Compelled as they are to follow the rules, the Commission told Joseph that he couldn’t be promoted two rungs up the ladder, as his new position called for, because those on the rung just below were permitted first crack at the job. Desperate to keep Joseph, his superiors decided to reduce his promotion by one rung. Joseph was still happy. The Commission wasn’t. They ruled that Joseph