AFT Public Employees task force, affiliates fight back against favoritism masked as 'reform'

The soul of public sector personnel systems is the civil service, which embodies the principles of accountability and fairness by setting qualifications and standards for job applicants and ensuring due process rights for employees. But under the guises of flexibility, efficiency and saving taxpayer money, anti-worker lawmakers are looking to civil service “reform” as a way to dismantle the system.

“You rarely see a fine articulation of the problem,” J. Edward Kellough, associate professor of public administration at the University of Georgia, told the AFT Public Employees civil service task force at its recent meeting. “When we move out of the realm of technical issues [such as hiring and disciplinary procedures], I’m not sure what problems are being addressed by the reforms.”

Members of the task force know. They know that the predominant number of “reform” proposals that have surfaced at the federal, state and local levels share one common objective: eliminating the rights their members have on the job.

The attacks are as blatant as Colorado Gov. Bill Owens’ aggressive push to eliminate all mention of the merit principle from the state constitution. That principle guards against cronyism by ensuring that state employees will be hired based on what they know, not who they know.

The attacks also are as surreptitious as privatizing or contracting out government work under the guise of “management flexibility” or saving taxpayer dollars. But even this is taking on a more blatant form.

Since early in his administration, President Bush has been pushing a privatization agenda, formalizing it with a directive to federal agencies to contract out nearly 1 million jobs to the private sector. President Bush’s initiative has inspired, if not encouraged, likeminded state and local lawmakers to move government in the same direction—out of government.
 

If it ain’t broke, don’t ‘fix’ it

The essence of the civil service system rests on three pillars: open competitive examinations, political neutrality and relative security of tenure, said Kellough, a preeminent expert on civil service. “The circumstances that gave rise to these core principles haven’t evaporated. These three pillars should still be supporting the concept of merit today. What we are seeing is that they are being eroded.”

The methods used to erode employee rights vary. For example, the chancellor of the University of Kansas at Lawrence tried to lure classified employees out of the civil service system by promising bigger raises. “KU was the first place they were pushing this agenda,” said Michael McLin, a labor relations specialist for the Kansas Association of Public Employees (KAPE) and a task force member. “If they got a yes vote, they would have moved to other universities—Wichita State, Pittsburg State and Kansas State.”

Among the misinformation fed to classified university employees, said McLin, was the promise of longevity bonuses if they declassified. “But under statute, they have to be classified employees to get the longevity bonuses.”

KAPE established a civil service task force to combat the university declassification effort—and thwarted it. But McLin said, “we’ve been hearing rumblings through the board of regents system that it will come back up.”

In North Dakota, on the other hand, the state’s human resources department recommended administrative rule changes earlier this year that would gut public employees’ job protections. Among its ambitions is changing the definition of “cause” and weakening the progressive discipline requirement, said Ron Gumeringer, who represents the North Dakota Public Employees Association (NDPEA) on the task force. But NDPEA has engaged members and lawmakers as well as the democratic gubernatorial candidate. Now, the issue of civil service reform is coming up in the governor’s race, he said.

In the realm of technical issues, Kellough said the trend is toward decentralization of authority for all core functions that take place in a personnel system, including hiring, pay and evaluation.

“It is a reaction to the perception that traditional systems are too rigid,” Kellough said. “But they are designed to be rigid to a certain extent because if you are going to have a structure of open competitive exams, political neutrality and protecting employees from abuse, there must be some measure of centralized oversight to ensure that this is accomplished. It is designed to be inflexible.”

Not all civil service reforms have been geared toward undermining the workforce, the task force noted during its group discussion. Reform legislation enacted in Washington state in 2002, for example, included collective bargaining rights for state employees.

Nevertheless, reforms that do not address the technical aspects of personnel are “driven by ideology and politics,” Kellough noted. “Sometimes there is a blending of both.”

Who’s lurking in the shadows?

Revelations that interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were contract employees has generated national media attention. Although the investigation into the role of the contractors in prisoner abuse had just begun at press time, the verdict was already in on the propriety of their presence.

“We don’t yet know for sure that private contractors were at fault,” wrote economist and syndicated columnist Paul Krugman in May. “But why put civilians, who cannot be court-martialed and hence aren’t fully accountable, in that role?”

Senior Wall Street executive and columnist for the Center for American Progress Ken Miller also criticized the Bush administration for its “religious zeal to outsourcing the key functions of government.” But his harshest remarks pertained to its cost. According to Miller, there are “20,000 hired hands furnished by 60 different private sector firms to perform functions typically undertaken by combat troops.”

“Of the $80 billion spent so far in Iraq, an estimated $10 billion has been paid to firms that are furnishing personnel for core combat functions,” Miller wrote in a column, “Outsource This,” noting that private soldiers are making as much as $1,500 a day compared to the average soldier in Iraq who earns about $70 a day.

“In Iraq, where there is little public or congressional oversight, the [Bush] administration has privatized everything in sight,” Krugman wrote. “For example, the Pentagon has a well-established procurement office for gasoline. In Iraq, however, that job was subcontracted to Halliburton. The U.S. government has many experts in economic development and reform. But in Iraq, economic planning has been subcontracted—after a highly questionable bidding procedure—to BearingPoint, a consulting firm with close ties to Jeb Bush.” 

One strategy AFT Public Employees affiliates have taken to protect the integrity of the civil service is to expose the cost, in taxpayer dollars and loss of accountability, of “shadow government,” the quasi-public entities and private contractors that are doing the work of government.

For example, securing accountability measures for state government contracting practices has been a perennial issue for AFT Connecticut. But under Republican Gov. John Rowland, who cut state workers last year to balance the budget, the union’s battle was uphill—until this year. With Gov. Rowland facing impeachment, in part due to the personal benefits he reaped from state contractors, AFT Connecticut’s calls for clean government started resonating with lawmakers. The result: a bill that would tighten contracting guidelines by requiring agencies to analyze both direct and indirect costs to the state. Moreover, the legislation would require bidding companies to report wages, annual staff turnover, staff training and political contributions.

The New York State Public Employees Federation’s (PEF) anti-privatization and anti-contracting message has gained traction as well this year, including the support of the state attorney general and comptroller.

“Consequently, a lot of political debate has been generated about it,” said Joe Fox, PEF vice president and member of the task force.

But as Fox noted, the political traction didn’t happen overnight. Fox’s point was that affiliates should be unrelenting in their efforts, despite perceived setbacks. Over the years, PEF tried to pass legislation to stop it and also challenged contracting in the courts. “But the governor always beat it,” he said.

PEF’s statewide advertising campaign last year, Cut State Waste, Not State Workers, lent momentum to the union’s attack. The ads, which ran in seven major newspapers, including the New York Times, featured mock coupons worth the millions of dollars the state would save by using public employees to do the work that has been contracted.

Employees: the frontline defense

When PEF polled its members about the issues most important to them, civil service came in third, said Fox.

“Public employees need to be involved in early detection,” says Tom Centrino, task force member and PEF’s director of civil service enforcement, noting that by virtue of their presence in the workplace, they are best positioned to observe the early warning signs. (See box at right.)

The task force has been a source of information and materials for affiliates, including background papers, “agency waste” forms to document government misspending, and advice on how to examine the records of private companies bidding on public services.

The task force also has looked at positive reforms to improve recruitment and retention among public employees. But all task force members agree: One size does not fit all.

And to the chagrin of elected officials who thought their anti-worker reforms would go unchecked, AFT Public Employees affiliates are exposing their real agendas: eliminating the systemic impediments that keep high-ranking elected officials from rewarding political cronies and business associates with jobs and contracts, paid for by taxpayers.