The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [113]
Civil service contributes to bureaucracy. “The City has two personnel systems, a Civil Service and a labor-relations system,” said Mayor Beame’s Management Advisory Board. “These provide total redundancy in many areas”—salary scales, employee-grievance procedures, and work rules are set by both systems. Because it is difficult to single out individuals, to judge work as opposed to test performance, the hot breath of competition is minimized. Our government system would qualify as an ideal antitrust case if government itself did not define a monopoly.
There has recently been some movement to change the system. The amended City Charter repealed Beame’s executive order, going back to Lindsay’s one-in-three rule to select aides. The Beame administration consolidated some job titles (called “broadbanding”), allowing more flexibility in awarding promotions. Labor leaders say they are receptive to further changes. Albert Shanker, president of the United Federation of Teachers, says he would like to “find some method that would allow managers to proceed against incompetent people.” Alan Viani, of D.C. 37, worries about “extreme” reforms but supports more broadbanding, freedom to transfer workers from one department or title to another, and lessening the reliance on written exams. President Carter made civil service reform one of his priorities and labored a modified reform bill through the Congress. Mayor Koch has denounced the system as “an outrage,” and introduced legislation to loosen the civil service strait jacket.
But change comes very slowly. For almost three years, Sandy Frucher, Executive Director of the Temporary State Commission on Management and Productivity, has sought to rouse the Governor and state legislature to amend the state Civil Service law. The Commission has conducted hearings, issued mountainous studies, lobbied legislators, comforted civil service unions, wooed the press.
He might as well have been a diseased animal. His reports were quarantined, as was the truckload of reform proposals gathering dust in the Municipal Library. Trying to change the system, wails Frucher, “is like pushing a boulder up a hill.” The Chairman of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, Alan Campbell, knows the feeling: “I’m not sure one can make it a sexy issue.”
Collective Bargaining
The Civil Service is a toothless tiger compared to the collective bargaining system. “The City’s capacity to act as an arm’s length employer in bargaining with the municipal unions is not what it should be,” mildly concluded the state Charter Revision Commission. The Management Advisory Board put it another way: “A Mayor’s ability to relate to municipal unions as chief manager of the City is sharply limited by his need to relate to them as an elected official.” Labor leader Victor Gotbaum, a disarmingly frank man, came closer to the truth when he said a few years ago, “We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.”
Negotiations are very different in the private and public sectors. The Charter Revision Commission said a public employer differed from a private employer in at least three critical respects: (1) “the Mayor is a political animal who, in many instances, must rely on the support of powerful union forces at election time”; (2) “the City, as employer, is not subject to the same constraints of supply and demand that dictate to the private employer in negotiations”; (3) “the Mayor, because third-party forces outside his control” often arbitrate and order settlements, “cannot say ‘no’ in negotiations and make it stick.” There are other constraints. A government does not generate profits. And a public strike—as the transit workers proved in 1966 and the bridge and toll collectors in 1971—can cripple a city.
Polls suggest public employee unions are not as popular today as they once were. They used to