The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [112]
“Civil Service makes it difficult for managers to perform,” said Jacob Ukeles of the Management Advisory Board. “For example, we have thousands of titles in the Civil Service, so it’s difficult to transfer people. The number of steps in the grievance system takes nine or more months. To manage, you need the ability to hire and fire, to redeploy, to change responsibilities. And you don’t have those things.” Commissioner Russo uses saltier language: “You could have the worst possible banana and still not be able to bring him up on charges.”
The Mayor’s Management Advisory Board, in 1977, counted more than 3,900 different Civil Service job titles, in 243 occupational groups. The federal government has only 22 occupational groups. The larger number of groups results in more rigid tests, more paperwork, more pigeonholing. If a person has the right test score, title, and group, he or she must be promoted to fill any opening—even if the manager does not think them qualified. The system takes over. Workers are reduced to titles. Salaries are pegged to titles, not performance. Promotions depend on test scores. Or seniority. Pay increments are awarded across the board, rather than individually. It is hard to reward initiative or punish failure. The system, in effect, robotizes workers into a fail-safe system. Sometimes workers feel it. So do their families. “I’m ashamed to tell the neighbors my husband works for the city,” a Queens woman writes. “After twelve years, they still don’t know.”
The so-called “merit system” also becomes a seniority system. As further protection against “politics,” civil service workers and others pushed for seniority laws. “In the police department, it took ten years to increase the number of black cops from 5 to 7.5 percent,” laments Koch’s Deputy Mayor for Labor Relations, Basil Paterson. “That increase was wiped out in six months by the layoffs.” Why? Because state law requires that layoffs be based solely on seniority. “Look at the police and fire departments,” Patterson says. “The youngest and most active and effective workers were the first to go. Merit should play a role. Opportunity should play a role.”
The civil service often discriminates in another way. It requires promotion from within. Which is fine, until you consider what is within. Few blacks, Hispanics or women populate the top or middle rungs of the civil service. Only 16 percent of the jobs near the top of mayoral agencies were held by women, a late 1977 study by Karen Gerard and Mary McCormick found. In the federal government, says Alan Campbell, Chairman of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, of the top 10 percent of civil service jobs only 4 percent of these are held by minorities and 2 percent by women. Of those eligible for promotion to these top slots—grades 13, 14 and 15—less than 6 percent are minority workers or women.
These dismal numbers are partially explained by another encumbrance grafted onto the civil service system—veterans’ preference. While the Bakke case and preferential treatment of blacks and other minorities aroused and polarized American opinion, the preferential treatment of veterans wins wide acclaim, or at least silence. In New York, a nondisabled veteran gets 5 percent added to his entrance exam and 2.5 percent to his promotion exam. But he may only invoke this preference once—unless there are layoffs. In the event of layoffs, a veteran gets thirty months’ seniority added to his service. The federal laws are more generous. In the case of layoffs, federal employees who are veterans—including those who served in no wars—get absolute bumping privileges (as was true in New York prior to 1973). Thus a veteran with three years on the job bumps a federal worker with twenty years’ service. The federal government also grants 5 percent