Public Employee Press

Part 1 in a series of articles on the attacks on government and public employees
Answering the Big Lies about Civil Service

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Deputy Mayor for Operations Stephen Goldsmith isn't a fan of civil service, much less unions - to put it mildly.

Since becoming Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's chief assistant in April, he has enthusiastically embraced the administration's plan to consolidate civil service jobs and move away from competitive exams for hiring and promotion.

He says so-called rigid civil service rules, high pension costs, inflexible union contracts and state laws make it impossible to introduce workplace changes that would avoid the city's need to lay off thousands of employees to close a $3 billion budget gap.

"The deputy mayor's attack on civil service and unions mirrors what's happening around the country as public employees are becoming scapegoats for governments' serious budget problems," DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts said.

"You really have to look at the agenda underlying the criticisms by Mr. Goldsmith, who would benefit from a greater dialog with us," she said. "He clearly views the civil service system and unions as obstacles to the administration's priorities of privatizing and cutting public services, decreasing employees' medical and retirement benefits and gaining complete mayoral control over hiring and promotions."

Corporate Policies

DC 37 General Counsel Mary O'Connell noted the irony that the Republican deputy mayor seems dead set on undermining the protections against cronyism and corruption that were championed over a century ago by Republican Teddy Roosevelt when he was federal civil service commissioner.

Goldsmith served from 1999 to 2001 as mayor of Indianapolis, where he developed a national reputation for introducing corporate practices into the public sector.

He cut $190 million in city spending by forcing the municipal workforce to compete with the private sector, but according to an article in City Limits magazine, the record was mixed. Indianapolis ended up spending an extra $300 million on the privatized services and had to bring some of the work back in-house.

A November article in Governing magazine provides a glimpse into Goldsmith's worldview. "It seems like a preemptive strike on unions and supporters of civil service," said Local 371 President Faye Moore, who chairs the DC 37 Civil Service Committee.

"The civil service system, with its thousands of rigidly defined jobs, is an anachronism," Goldsmith writes. "When we reward the mediocre, promote the less qualified and restrict problem-solving discretion, we demean public servants, degrade the quality of service and cheat taxpayers."

Evelyn Seinfeld, acting director of the DC 37 Research and Negotiations Dept., said Goldsmith's polemic misrepresents the civil service system. Far from demeaning workers, civil service empowers them and protects them from management abuses, she said. Along with legal and contractual rules, civil service guarantees employees due process rights if they are disciplined or terminated.

Union Flexibility

"The rules don't stand in the way of good management," Seinfeld said. Nothing in civil service stops management from disciplining or terminating workers. Civil service simply requires that management follow procedures that treat workers fairly and not arbitrarily, she said.

DC 37 Blue Collar Division Director José Sierra and DC 37 Professional Division Director Nola Brooker dispute Goldsmith's contention that civil service rules and union contracts stifle workplace innovation, labor-management cooperation and worker creativity.

"We are always willing to sit down with management when they come to us with concerns," Sierra said. "The mostly unspecified 'rigid' rules that the deputy mayor cites actually provide a framework for discussion."

Brooker pointed to a recent project in which the union worked with the Health and Hospitals Corp. to add a 40-bed unit at Queens Hospital as an example of labor-management cooperation.

"The mayor originally wanted to contract out the project. Instead, all the work was done in-house, which has benefited labor and management," Brooker said.

Local 1455 President Michael DeMarco said an innovative bidding program on street signs has increased productivity and provided additional pay for workers at the Transportation Dept.

Citing Goldsmith's criticism of the "direct dealing" rule, which requires management to negotiate the terms and conditions of work with unions, Associate General Counsel Robin Roach said Goldsmith seems to want not flexibility but a nonunion workplace where management can do whatever it wants to employees.

Roach said that far from restricting hiring, as Goldsmith contends, the civil service system and labor law allow the city to create new titles and define work. This puts the union on the defensive when it comes to shaping job responsibilities, she said.

Jesse Gribben, the DC 37 attorney who advises the DC 37 Civil Service Committee, called Goldsmith's concerns about hiring restrictions "overblown." The one-in-three rule, which the union wants to end, lets managers skip over workers they don't favor on civil service lists. Furthermore, workers serve a probation period, he said, giving management a year to decide whether to keep an employee.

Back To Tammany Hall?

Seinfeld said if Goldsmith's broad attack on civil service succeeds, the city would return to the cronyism, patronage and corruption of the Tammany Hall era.

"To cancel civil service seniority and disciplinary protections would send us down the path of what's happened in the private sector, where companies have spent decades chipping away at the power of unions, destroyed pensions and gutted the rights of workers," Seinfeld said. "Do we really want that to be the future for the public sector?"

"The civil service system offers a beacon of hope to all workers," Roberts said. "It is the bedrock of good government. It protects the rights of workers, and it also protects the public from malfeasance. This union will never back down from vigorously fighting to defend civil service."