The Streets Were Paved with Gold (32 page)

Equipment breakdowns hinder productivity. The Sanitation Department’s 1976 management plan predicted that 43 percent of their mechanical sweepers would be out of service at any one time. Actually, 52 percent were. Other unanticipated problems arise. The Medical Examiner’s Office found that the attrition policy was too successful—their staff was 30 percent below budget. The Corrections Department exceeded their overtime spending goal by 24 percent, but blamed unanticipated prison riots. Some city agencies even complained that the increased paperwork required by the productivity program reduced productivity. The October 1976 Department of Consumer Affairs report apologized that its Enforcement Division had not performed as many garage and gas
station inspections as planned because: “The inspectors spent an additional day in the office so that the productivity figures would be calculated and the report submitted on time.”

Improved productivity also assumes worker cooperation. City officials may hatch ambitious schemes and mechanize their flow charts, but workers are not machines. They need to be motivated, to get a sense of satisfaction from their work, to maintain their morale. But workers have reason to be insecure. The job security they expected from a government job is no longer there. For the first time since the Depression, they are being asked to give back benefits won at the bargaining table. They
feel
(inaccurately) that their pay was frozen for the first three years of the fiscal crisis. They
feel
(accurately) that compared to the banks or politicians or managers, workers have born a disproportionate share of what sacrifices were made. Workers know that their pension funds are threatened if the city goes bankrupt. They
feel
the press portrays them as slothful. “Every time they read the press,” says labor consultant Jack Bigel, “they see it’s the city workers who are overpaid and underworked. They feel they’ve been held up to ridicule.” It’s worth noting, in this regard, that one-third of the 36,000 workers lost through attrition resigned rather than retired.

Recognizing the obstacles to productivity is not the same as saying it can’t be done, as city and union leaders tend to. A 1977 audit of Martin Lang’s Parks Department by State Comptroller Arthur Levitt, for example, highlights what remains to be done. Loafing by Parks employees, Levitt said, cost the city more than $18 million that year. Crews were averaging less than 50 percent of their workdays in productive efforts, routinely taking seventy-five-minute breakfast breaks, arriving at work sites ninety-five minutes late; forestry and maintenance crews were idle 61 percent of the workday; half of the supervisors were assigned to cushy desk jobs. A 50 percent Parks productivity improvement, the Comptroller said, would totally compensate for the personnel cuts imposed by the fiscal crisis. In short, a reduced work force could improve—and at least maintain—services. A similar Levitt audit of city pothole repair crews found that if they “had been fully productive, they could have filled 700,000 more potholes than the 1.2 million which the department reported it had filled” in 1977. The audit concluded that repair crews spent more than one-third of their time not filling potholes. That’s the day shift. The night shifts were “unproductive” 52 percent of the time. The average age of the asphalt crewmen
was fifty-seven years—a backbreaking job for a man that age.

The major impediment to productivity is not definitional; it’s managerial and political. The city lacks both a managerial ethos and management know-how. And it lacks the political will, as Beame demonstrated, or political clout, as Koch was learning, to change union work rules which impede improved services. The minutes of a September 27, 1976, meeting between Deputy Mayor Zuccotti and Sanitation Commissioner Anthony Vaccarello are instructive. The city was pressing the union to allow two rather than three men to work a sanitation truck in certain districts. The union contract is silent on the subject, but the city dared not unilaterally alter a longstanding practice. The minutes simply read: “Union won’t negotiate with Department on this issue.… Issue to be raised with Office of Labor Relations.” Asked whether he had raised this issue, Labor Relations Commissioner Russo replied, “One of the things labor leaders and their people argue is that at the productivity table we should not try to get back their benefits. That, they say, must be reserved for collective bargaining. Yet when we bring it up at collective bargaining, they tell us, ‘Go to hell!’ ”

Not to press that issue was a political decision, as Beame’s stance when seeking reelection in 1977 was political. Like most incumbents, Beame boasted of the city’s accomplishments, downplaying its problems. He said the city had “turned the corner” because he had “made the tough decisions.” His “balanced” $14 billion budget for fiscal 1978 contained money to rehire laid-off workers, stop the attrition clock from running, keep libraries open, provide pay increases and slightly reduce taxes—though he acknowledged the next three budgets would be in the red. It would be left for the next Mayor to play Scrooge. Asked why the Mayor was halting the agreed policy of shrinking the city’s work force, Deputy Mayor Zuccotti replied, “That’s a good point. I would say to you there probably would have to be additional reductions in city manpower.” Beame had made a political decision, and one with productivity consequences. By emphasizing what had been done rather than what remained to be done, by expanding rather than contracting the city’s budget and work force, the Mayor was flashing the green light, whetting appetites, blowing an opportunity to win greater public support for change. Why should a worker or resident believe further sacrifices were required when the Mayor’s actions suggested otherwise?

The new Koch administration promised to emphasize productivity.
As a candidate, Koch opposed “blind attrition” and vowed to improve services. Yet as mayor he enlarged Beame’s attrition program. His first management report said “nothing of the quality of performance” of city agencies, complained Queens Councilman Edward Sadowsky. It listed the number of arrests, he said, but not “how many arrests held up in court”; cited the number of square yards of streets repaved, but not the number needing repavement. Koch’s four-year financial plan, unlike Beame’s, called for major management improvements and savings. But it also contained this little-noticed sentence: “The citizens of New York will continue to encounter reduced services.”

On his first full day as mayor—January 2, 1974—Abe Beame issued an executive order requiring all agency heads to select civil service aides strictly on the basis of the highest decimal-point rating on a written civil service examination. The message: there would be no favoritism in the Beame administration. The Lindsay administration’s “reform”—permitting a commissioner to pick from one of the three top exam scorers—was banished. Henceforth, the mayor’s written permission would be required. Beame, the career civil servant, was hailed by the civil service associations and many good-government forces. It was commonly assumed the Mayor had minimized “politics” in the selection of staff aides.

Fear of “politics” has a long tradition. The civil service system was first introduced in 1883 as a reaction against the spoils system. Washington newspapers once carried political advertisements requesting $5,000 in cash for a $1,500-a-year government job. New York political bosses involuntarily advanced the career of cartoonist Thomas Nast, who immortalized their cigar smoke, corruption, bulging wallets and stomachs. With the introduction of the civil service, government workers were given a necessary sense of security, of protection from political whim and favoritism. “My father was a barber,” Arthur Tibaldi once told a reporter. “He said, ‘You need security. Work for the City. You got a job for a lifetime.’ ” That sense of security was important to an immigrant population, and created greater government stability and professionalism.

But over the years the civil service calcified. A system designed
to protect the public’s interests came to protect the employee’s; granting employees what, in effect, is lifetime tenure, is not the best way to keep them on their toes. The merit system became, in the words of a 1972 report from the city’s administrator, “a meritless system.” This 143-page report, prepared under the guidance of Deputy City Administrator E. S. Savas, went on to plead that good people could not be selected solely on the basis of a written examination (the federal civil service, for instance, permits no written exams above college entrance level). The report also said that strong municipal unions had come to duplicate the protections of the state civil service law.

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 would have to compete in a written examination with all others at that level. If he failed to finish among the top three, he would be forced to return to his old job. It didn’t matter that he was doing a good job, that his bosses were pleased with his work. The system had taken over.

“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.”