Case study, Cutback Management in the St. Croix: A RIF in the USDA

Public Administration T+••T+••T+••T+••T+•

The Profession and the Practice '

A Case Study Approach

GERALD GARVEY Princeton University

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SECTION 1 .. ~·

PublicPe~onnelA~ttation

ln the paper of 1887 in which he presented what many still regard as the clearest state- ment of the Progressives' administrative concepts, Woodrow Wilson called for reform of the governance process in three key areas: personnel, organization, and methods. Its sig- nificant that Wilson listed the need for high-quality people at the top of his agenda. To Wilson, improvements in public personnel administration-the specialists usually shorten it to PPA-had to be the basis on which all the other Progressive reforms would have to rest:

[C]ivil service reform must ... expand into efforts to improve, not the per- sonnel only, but also the organization and me thods of our government offices .... Civil service reform is thus but a moral preparation for what is to follow. It is clearing the moral atmosphere of official life by establishing the sanctity of public office as a public trust, and, by making the service unpar- tisan, it is opening the way for making it businesslike.

The reforms to which Woodrow Wilson referred originated in the determination of the Progressive reformers to root out the corrupt and crassly political influences of the nineteenth-century spoils system . Under this syste m , politicians doled out gov- ernment jobs (patronage) to their supporters, often without reference to their qualifica- tions. Although the reformers aimed especially at the abuses of this practice in the machine-dominated big cities, they worked to eliminate the spoils system in federal and state governments as well. Despite variations in the details of their various programs, the Progressives generally agreed on certain broad policy aims. The civil service structures that gradually emerged therefore broadly resembled one another across the federal, state, and local levels. With a few notable exceptions, they continue to do so even today.

Origin and Evolution of the Civil Service

The supporters of Andrew Jackson who installed the spoils system didn't view their practices in the jaundiced way that the reformers of a few generations later would. As

29

30 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

President jackson himself put it in 1829, "The duties of all public olficers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may read1ly qualify themselves fo r their performance .... "1 The jacksomans saw the appointment of "plain and simple" citizens-based on their suppon of electoral VIctors rather than on proved technical qualifications-not as an mv1tauon to conuption and mediocnty but as a way to guarantee democratic governance.

In theory, patronage-based job filling ensured an unbroken line of responsiveness running from the majority of the people through their elected representatives to the appointive officials who would actually carry out the duties of day-to-day administra- tion. (As we'll see later, twentieth-ce ntury scholars of public administration would call essentially the same concept by a fancier name, "the principal-agent cham.") The rOLa- tion of incumbents into and out of office wi th changes in administration would auto- matically produce civil servants whose opinions reflected the views of elected leaders. By extension, civil servants would reflect the views of the electorate itself. Defenders of the spoils system saw it as a contributor to the 1mponant value of pohtical responsive- ness. So, at least, went the theory.

As the system worked in practice, however, the victors after every election often simply hi red their cousins and cronies. The scandal of public job filling on the basis of political connections became a defining moral1ssue in the late nineteenth century, much as slavery had been before the Civi l War. Worse, patronage-based appointments pre- vented the buildup of the kind of expen1se needed for the problems of a complex urban society. Perhaps the most perceptive observer of all , the German sociologist Max Weber, wrote that only an extravagantly wealthy country could afford the "corruption and wastefulness" of politicized , amateur public administration. "Dilellante management ," Weber called it. Not even the United States was rich enough to suppon so irrational a public personnel system indefinitely. By the late nineteenth century, Weber wrote, "irrefrageable needs of the administrat ion" had forced reforms. Weber saw the old sys- tem of personnel staffing based on panisan favoritism and political patronage "inevitably and gradually giving way formally to the bureaucrauc structure."2 (We will return to Weber and his theory of the bureaucrauc structure m Chapter 3.)

Three Foundational Civil Service Principles

The spoils system had made it relauvely easy for an individual to enter federal service--or to leave it, since patronage-based appointees could be dismissed for causes having nothing to do with their techmcal competence. The Pendleton Act of 1883, the culmination of decades of of civil service reform agitation, changed all that. The 1883 act enshrined the principle of a ppointment by merit, the first foundational principle of the civil service. Under the merit prinCiple, a candidate for civil service appointment had to pass a standardized written civil service test or possess formal academic creden- tials for the job. Though the wriuen-test requirement initially applied primarily to clerk- level positions, the idea of merit-based appointment gradually spread through the higher

'Andrew jackson, message to Congress, Dec 8, 1829.

In H. Genh and C. W Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1946). p. 88; see also pp. 201, 211.

Public Personnel Administration 31

administrative, professional, and technical jobs (APT is the term personnel specialists use in reference to workers in such slOLs). More realistic evaluation procedures gradu- ally spread throughout the civil service. Today the merit requirement of the typical APT job is satisfied not by a written test but by a careful assessment of the candidates edu- cational qualifications a nd prior experience in jobs like the one being considered .

The civil servant, after a p robationary period, enjoys civil service tenure-the promise of steady government work with the right not to be let go except for cause. The Progressives expected that job security would encourage a civil servant faithfully to exe- cute his or her office without fear of rep risals: A tenured official can't be fired for taking the politically incorrect position. Closely related to the principle of tenure was the c ri- terion of seniority, eventually given a firm statutory basis in another major piece of Pro- gressive Era legislation, the Lloyd-Lafollette Act of 1913. To this day, seniority signifi- cantly affects a civil servants pay level and also offers signi ficant protections against being laid-off in a reduction in force (RIF) necessitated by a budgetary shortfall or a change in the misstOn of a pubhc agency.

Federal statutes from as far back as the 1850s had anticipated in rudimentary form the thtrd foundauonal pri nciple, position classification. The original federal classifica- tion laws required department heads to grade their clerk-employees and pay them at a level prescribed by law for each step in the scale. Municipal and state governments eventually began experiments \vith more elaborate classification formulas . In 1912 the City of Chicago, and shortly thereafter the State of lllinois, installed classification systems of their own. Other cities and states followed suit. A line from a 1920 textbook-one of the first to treat personnel administration as a special body of expert knowledge-<ap- tured the spirit of the position classification movement: "The job is the molecule of industry; and what mo lecular study has done for physics and chemistry job study with the aid o f every possible instrument of precision can begin to do for industry. "3

The Classification Act of 1923 completed the basic structure of the federal civil ser- vice. Position classification was in essence an enactment into law of the much-maligned mode rn concept of comparable worth, which requires that salaries be ftxed by ad min- istrative decision rather than by market fo rces. The pay that goes with a job is supposed to reflect the economic value of the skills that a worker brings to the position. Person- nel experts in a central office-the Civil Service Commission-were to decide what skills were needed and what level of pay they should command . The "equal pay for equal work" standard became official, as did the "rank in the job" principle, under which civil service status broadly depends on the position that an employee fills. An incumbent who, through extra education or in some other way, becomes overqualified can't read- ily convert his or her higher level of competence into an inc rease in authorily o r a raise in pay unless a vacant position exists into which the individual may be promoted.

The Public Personnel Structure Today

The Civil Service Refonn Act of 1978 renamed the Civil Service Commission the federal Office of Personal Management (OPM) and, at least in theory, underscored that

Ordway Tead and Henry C. Metcalf, Personnel Aclmrnistrarion: Its Prindples and Practice (New York- McGraw-HHI, 1920), p. 255

32 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

the OPM was on a par with the powerful Office of Management and Budget within the Executive Office of the President. The 1978 act also proVlded for increased flexibility in federal personnel appointment and promotion processes and created the Senior Exec- utive Service (SES), intended as an elite cadre of public management generalists capa- ble o f filling the critical job slots between the president's political appointees at the pin- nacle of the federal bureaucracy and lower-level career civil servants. Finally, the act confirmed today$ unified system of civil service grades, each with its tnternal promo- tional steps carrying increased pay with mcreased seniority in the grade.

At the top of the personnel structure of the federal executtve branch are the pres- idem and from two thousand to three thousand political appomtees--m effect, presi- dential patronage employees. (Typically, in state and local governments the governor or mayor makes reduced numbers of poltttcal appomtments. Numbers aside, the basic pat- tern's the same at all levels. Chief executives everywhere try to fill the top posts with loyalists who , because they share the boss$ views, can be trusted to convey hts or her inte ntions to the career appointees tn the lower ranks .) In the federal government, the political layer includes cabinet officers and offictals such as the presidents Special Trade Representative and the White House "Drug Poltcy Czar," who hold cabinet rank even though they don't head major departments of government. The political layer also includes deputy secretaries, undersecretaries , assistant secretaries, principal deputy assistant secretaries (no fooling!), deputy assistant secretaries, and other relattvely high- level executive-branch officials.

Beneath the political layer, nonpolitical c1vil serVlce appomtees fill slots known as general schedule (GS) grades. Most occupants of the top three grades, GS-18 down through GS-16, belong to theSES. Career officials in grades GS-15 down through GS- 9 are the workhorses of the federal seMce. These-the APTs who constitute almost 50 percent of the total civilian classified service-are the degree-holding accountants, civil engineers, economists, lawyers, sotl conservationists, and so on, through all the separate occupational series in today$ federal bureaucracy. Clerical and custodial personnel (grades GS-8 down to GS-l) complete the structure.

In the early 1990s the federal classificatton system contained some seven hundred separate occupations, eighteen GS grades, and ten "steps" within each grade. The num- ber of separate job slots in state c1vil service systems varies from over five hundred in South Dakota to more than seven thousand (yes, you read it right!) in New York. The jobs themselves are customarily dtvided to form hierarchies of organizational units: Agencies split into bureaus, bureaus mto dtvlstons or offices, offices into branches, branches into sections, and so fonh on down to individual frontline administrators. In this way the civil service personnel structure has evolved as the perfect complement to the bureaucratic organizational structure of most government agencies.

In recent years some leaders in the personnel subfield have touted a human resources approach, sometimes called "the new PPA." Proponents of this approach seek to shift the focus of "the old PPA" from its alleged fussiness, its traditional preoc- cupation with the intricacies of the classtfication system, and its "triumph of technique over purpose," in the oft-quoted words of one authomy.• Champions of the new per-

'ThiS charactenzauon of the public personnel process was the title of an antcle by Wallace Sayre, 8 Public Adm~nrstration Review (Spri ng 1948): 134-139.

Public Personnel Administration 33

sonnel approach want to be less bureaucratic and more con cerned with the develop- ment of professional capacity by recruiting individuals with the needed abilities ("exter- nal extraction" of talent, in the language of PPA) and developing intra-agen cy methods for the adaptation and upgrading of workers' skills ("internal extraction"). Doubters say that the human resources approach is merely the old personnel routines without some of the petty regulations and procedures. Even advocates of the approach admit that it can work only if public managers are free to increase workplace flexibility and develop rewards for individual performance.

The proponents of the human resources approach are converging toward the kinds of arguments for a loosening-up of the civil service that have been popularized b y anothe r group of analysts: the New Theorists, who stan from very different assumptions about the motives and creativity of public-sector employees. The New Theorists are among the most influential thinkers in contemporary public administration. We'll come back to them after we sample a range of opinions about PPA by some commentators who are less given than the New Theonsts are to the use of technical terms and a highly formal style of analysis.

Our first selection comes from a leadmg scholar of public administration, Charles Goodsell of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Goodsell$ voice IS perhaps the most eloquent yet to be raised on our civil servants' behalf. His spirited defense of bureaucrats as intelligent, energetic, and innovative servants of the people counters the stereotype. Is Goodsell too soft on our public servants? Is his panegyric for bureaucracy overstated? Many critics think so. But some overstatement on the pro- bureaucracy side of the PPA debate may be in order at this point-if only to counter- balance some of the bureaucrat bashing that we'll be witnessing in the pages to come!

Charles Goodsell on the Defense of Bureaucrats as Ordinary People

Let us begin by elaborating common depictions of public bureaucracy so that we can appreciate w hat making the case for it confronts. As for ponrayals in mass media, we encounter a relatively si mple pic- ture, confidently expressed . The employee of bu- reaucracy, that "lowly bureaucrat," is seen as lazy or snarling, or both. The office occupied by this pariah is Vlewed as bunghng or mhumane, or both. The overall edifice of bureaucracy is pictured as over- staffed, inflexible, unresponsive, and power-hungry, all a t once. These images are agreed upon by writers and groups of every shade of opinion. O ne is hard pressed to think o f a concept more deeply ingrained and widely expressed in American cultural life ....

O n e way to strip the bureaucrat of his or her sup- posed distinctiveness is simply to note how many bureaucrats there are. The club of bureaucrats is not exclusive enough to be very ominous. A sizable pro-

portion of Americans belong, in fact more than one out of six employed persons. The overall figures, rounded o ff, are that the federal government em- ploys 5 million (3 civilian, 2 military), state govern - ments 4 million , and local governments 9 million. This adds up to 18 million people.

Besides their vast numbers, another featu re of bu- reaucrats that places them on a fairly o rdinary and unawesome plane is what they do. They do not si m- ply shuffie papers, attend meetings, and telephone la- conically with no hands. Nor do they just give orders; managers in government are a distinct minority of the whole. What bureaucrats do is n othing less than the myriad of highly specialized tasks performed in a modern technological society-the matter is bo th that complex and that simple .... Bureaucrats oper- ate bridges, investigate crimes, manage forests, pro- gram computers, arbitrate labor disputes, counsel

34 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

teenagers, calculate cost-benefit ratios, operate sea- rescue cutters, run libraries, examine patent applica- tions, inspect meat, negotiate contracts, and so on and so forth .... Occupational directories and JOb classification handbooks put out by government personnel agencies run to the hundreds of pages The point is simply that bureaucrats don't ~bur"­ there is no common occupational activity the> all perform. These men and women do almost every- thing, which means that even at face value general- izalions about their nature or behavior are strongly suspect. ...

Who, then, are the bureaucrats? They are a great bunch of us, in the first place. In the second place they are not generalizable in terms of occupational activity. Third, bureaucrats are representative of the public at large in terms of education, social status, religion, income, and party affiliation. Mi nority bureaucrats are disproportionately present m overall numbers but do not hold their fair share of htgh- level JObs. Women are underrepresented on both counts, although this ts changmg. Finally, bureau- crats and the rest of us have similar political and pol- icy views ....

One may reply ... by saying that certainly these ordinary Americans do not leave their homes at mght to join conspiracies, but on amving at the office the next morning, something even worse happens. The)' become transformed into petty t}Tants. This argu- ment has been taken very seriously in academic cir- cles for some fony years and should be examined closely. The contention is formidable: The structure of bureaucracy itself produces a distinctive mentahty or personality on the pan of its full-time, appointed staff. Whether by self-selection m entering bureau- cratic employment or by sociahzauon once in n, the bureaucrat is deemed to possess a pantcular LUm of mind and pattern of behavior. These attnbutes and behaviors are said to be quite nasty, at the least

This school of analysis began with a famous article by Robert Menon, "Bureaucratic Suucture and Per- sonali ty," published in 1940.' Merton argued that ... the specialized nature of bureaucratic work causes

\\e will consider Menons semmal cssa)' \Vlth some care m C hapter-+.

"an inadequate flexibility in the apphcauon of skills." This ts said to occur because an extreme narrowness in scope of work does not allow the functionary to be capable of adapting to ever-changmg conditions. Second, the need for reliability and discipline in bu- reaucrauc output causes officials to overemphasize the importance of rules. They then forget the initial reason for the rules, and in a "displacement of goals" phenomenon, enforcement of the rules surpasses in Importance m the bureaucrats mmd what the orga- nizauon is trymg ultimately to achieve . . ..

Endless addnional p•eces of published \vriting could be cited on this bureaucratic mentality, in- asmuch as n IS a favonte theme not merely among professional cnucs of bureaucracy but among jour- nalists, novelists, and writers of letters to the editor. Like the stereotype of bureaucracy, the Image conve- niently captures the many fmstrations of those who work in or with large governmental organizations, a group that Includes JUSt about everyone that is of school age or over. Moreover, with in the social sci- ences the notion has acquired its own momentum as an idea m vogue, and this momentum has scarcely slowed over four decades. To that extent, then, is the model verified empirically?

Perhaps the best-known empirical study, and partly for that reason one of the most controversial, is a proJect undertaken by Melvm Kohn. In it he anempted to measure the effects of employment in a bureaucracy, whether private or public. Kohns inter- est extended to the employees' values, social orienta- tion, and Intellectual functioning. A national sample of 3,10 l men employed in civilian occupations was surveyed by structured interview. ... Kohns main findmg was simple: Correlations of bureaucratiza- tion wtth these factors [the list included conformity to external authority; a personality orientation of an authontanan, legahsuc, and noninnovative nature; and low problem-solving intell igence scores) were notably small. Even more interesting, the directions of correlation consistently contradicted what the bureaucratic personality is supposed to be like!

Men who work in bureaucratic firms or orga- nizations tend to value, not conformity, but self-direction. They are more open-minded,

have more personally responsible standards of morality, and are more receptive to change than are men who work in nonbureaucratic organi- zations. They show great Oexibility in dealing both with perceptual and ideational proble ms. They spend their leisure time in more intellec- tually demanding activities.~

... We discover, then, that the empirical evidence reviewed concerning the "bureaucratic personality" is generally disconfirming rather than supportive. Bureaucrats are no less Oexible, tolerant , and creative than other people-perhaps they are a little more so. Compared to business executives, bureaucrats may

' Melvin L. Kohn , "Bureaucratic Man: A Portrait and an lnterpre- uuion," 36 American Sociologtcal Rcvu:w Uune 1971): 461-474.

Public Personnel Administration 35

be less risk-prone but do not seem less motivated , assured, or decisive. Welfare bureaucrats, with their terrible reputation for being disrespectful to clients and overzealous in rule enforcement, entertain posi- ti ve images of clients more oft en than negative ones, and exhibit nexible attitudes toward compl iance with regulations ....

"Well , maybe its time to challenge the stereotype, to say something nice about the faceless millions who labor for government all over the country," ad- mits one columnist. 7

From Charles T Goodsell, The Case for Bureaucracy, 2d ed. (Chatham ;-\j Chatham House, 1985), pp. 2, 82-83, 9 1. 95, 103. 109.

Bob Willis, Roanol1c Times & World News. Sept. 16, 1980

Notwithstandmg the appreciation of our public servants offered by scholars such as Charles Goodsell, from an early point in the history of the civil service onward, critics have argued that cemralized hiring and fi ring, detailed position classificatio n by personnel specialists, and lockstep advancement through a rigid personnel structure couldn't help but promote inOexibility and inefficiency in the public service. Arguably the central issue in PPA today is whether the apparatus of personnel principles and pro- cedures that the Progressives erected to facilitate efficient governance have somehow evolved into a system o f barriers to sound administration.

The following excerpt , which represents an offsetti ng opinion to that of Professor Goodsell , comes from David Osborne and Ted Gaeblers Reinventing Govemmcnt, pub- lished in 1992-reputedly the greatest popular best-seller in the history of public ad ministration. President Bill Clinton ordered the senior members of his administration to use the Osborne-Gaebler volume as a kind of do-it-yourself kit for ove rhauling the federal bureaucracy.

Osborne and Gaebler didn't pretend to give a balanced picture of the current per- sonnel system. They also didn't purport to be bureaucrat bashers, yet thats the way many readers interpreted their critique of the civil service. How, then , are we to account fo r the inOuence of their rather-biased analysis? The answer-as our reading from Goodse ll will already have suggested-is probably that Osborne and Gaebler express a mood of dissatisfaction common both among opinion shapers and among ordinary cit- izens. Note, however, that the Osbome-Gaebler critique has to do with alleged ineffi- ciencies in the public bureaucracy, whereas Goodsell$ defense was of the bureaucrats themselves, rather than of the institution in which they work.

As you read the Osbome-Gaebler selection-which includes the authors' account of traduional public-sector budgeting practices along with the1r cntique of civil service inefficiencies-take special note of the distinction they draw between a mission-driven organization and a rule-d riven organ ization . Its a distinction you'll want to keep in mind as you deal with o ur chapter case.

36 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

David Osborne and Ted Gaebler on a Personnel System for the Twenty-First Century

Most public organizations are driven not by their missions, but by their rules and their budgets. They have a rule for everything that could conceivably go w rong and a line-ilem for every subcategory of spendi ng in every unit of every department The glue that holds public bureaucracies together, in other words, is like epoxy: it comes in two separate tubes. O ne holds rules, the other line items. Mix them togethe r and you get cement

Entrepreneu rial governments dispense with bOlh tubes. They get rid of the old rule books and dissolve the line items. They define their fundamental mis- sions, then develop budget systems and rules that free their employees to pursue those missions.

Some rules are necessary to run any organization. But as James Q. Wilson writes, "The United States relies on rules to control the exercise of official judg- ment to a greater extent than any other industrial- ized democracy." Wilson ascribes this tendency to our system of checks and balances, which makes each power center so weak that everyone falls back on rules to control what everyone else can do. But the tendency escalated dramatically during the Progres- sive Era, when reformers were struggling to control Boss Tweed and his cronies. To control the 5 percent who were dishonest, the Progressives created the red tape that so frustrates the other 95 percent.

To this day, whenever things go wrong, politicians respond with a blizzard of new rules. A business would fire the individual responsible , but govern- ments keep the offenders on and punish everyone else by wrapping them up in red tape. They close the barn door after the horse has escaped-locking in all the cowhands.

We embrace our rules and red tape to prevent bad things from happening, of course. But those same rules prevent good things from happening. They slow government to a snails pace. They make it impossible to respond to rapid ly changing environ- ments. They build wasted time and effort into the very fabric of the o rganization ....

Creating a Mission-Driven Budget System

Governments rules are aggregated into systems- budget systems, personnel systems, purchasmg sys- tems, accounting system . The real payoff comes when governments deregulate these systems, be- cause they create the basic incentives that dnve e m- ployees. If leaders tell their employees to focus on their miss1on , but the budget and personnel systems tell them to follow the rules and spend within the line Items, the employees will listen to the systems. The leaders' misswn will vanish like a m1rage. ... Few people outside government pay any attention to budget systems. But budgets control everything an agency does. They are onerous and omnipresent, useless and demeaning. They suck enormous quan- u ues of time away from real work. They trap man- agers in yesterdays priorities, which quickly become tomorrow's waste.

At the root of these problems lies a villain. Most public budgets fe nce agency money into dozens of separate accounts, called line items. This was origi- nally done to control the bureaucrats-to h em them m on all sides, so they could not spend one penny more than the council or legislature mandated on each item of government But once again, our attempt to prevent bad management made good manage- ment impossible .

If you started a business, you would ask your bookkeeper to track how much you spent on travel, supplies, personnel, and so on. But you surely wouldn't let the bookkeeper control how much you spent under each account. The same is true of fam- ily budgets: you may set aside so much for groceries, so much for the mortgage, and so much for car pay- ments every month . But if the washing machine breaks, you find the money to fix it, and if manu- facturers offer rebates on new cars, you seize the opportunity.

Public manage rs can not do this. Their funds are fenced with in line items that are often absurdly nar-

row. In one branch of the military, base managers have 26 different accounts for housing repairs alone! A typical manager of a city depanment has 30-40 line items for every program or division. In most cities and many states, legislatures not only dictate line items, they tell each unit how many full-time employees it can have .. ..

Trans forming a Rule-Driven Personnel System

The only thing more destructive than a line item budget system is a personnel system built around civil service . Most personnel systems in American government are derivatives of the federal Civil Ser- vice Act of 1883 [the Pendleton Act], passed after a disappointed office seeker assassinated President Garfield. A typical Progressive reform, civil service was a well-intentioned elTon to control specific abuses: patronage hiring and political manipulation of public employees. In most places, it accomplished its goals. But like a howitzer brought out to shoot ants, it left us with other problems. Designed for a government of clerks, civil service became a strait- jacket in an era of knowledge workers.

Fifty years ago, governments were not un ionized. Nor had the courts outlawed most patronage hiring and firing and protected most employees from wrongful discharge. In other words, most of what civil service procedures were established to prevent has been ruled illegal or made impossible by collec- tive bargaining agreements. Yet the control mentality lives on , creating a gridlock that turns public man- agemem into the an of the impossible .. . .

In business, personnel is a support funct ion, to help managers manage more effectively. In gov- ernment, it is a control function-and managers bit- terly resent it. Civil service rules are so complex that most managers find them impenetrable. The federal personnel manual, to cite but one example, is 6,000 pages long. Consider just a few of the major problems.

Hiring. Managers in civil service systems cannot hire like normal managers: advertise a position, take resumes, interview people, and talk lO references.

Public Personnel Adminis tration 37

They have to hire most employees from lists of those who have taken written civil service exams. Often they have to take the top scorer, or one of the top three scorers-regardless of whether that person is motivated or otherwise qualified. (In San F ran- cisco, if two applicants tie for the top score , the one with the highest social security number gets the job.) . ..

Classification. Civil service jobs are classified on a graded scale, and pay within each classification is determined by longevity, not performance. Person- nel departments spend thousands upon thousands of useless hours deciding whether such-and-such a job is a GS-12 or a GS-13 , telling managers they can- not pay the salary they want to because the classifi- cation doesn't allow it, and blocking their efforts lO reclassify people. Even when classification changes are approved , the process takes forever. In Massa- chusetts, where local governments have lO get ap- proval from the state, it can take two years.

Prom otion. When people hit the lOp of their pay range, they cannm earn a raise \vithout earning a promotion into a new type of work. But promotions are controlled by the personnel department, not the manager. They seldom hav~ anything to do with per- formance. In a typical line job-in a police depart- ment, or data processing office-managers have to promote from among those already in the proper career track who have scored highest on the promo- tional exam.

Firing. There$ an old saying: "Government work- ers are like headless nails: you can get them in, but you can't get them out. " Federal employees cannot be fired until a manager has spent months (if not years) carefully documenting poor performance and the employee has then exhausted three appeals processes--the first two of which alone take an aver- age of 224 days. State and local governments have their own versions of this scenario. The process is so time consuming and difficult that few managers ever fire anyone. Qames Q. Wilson estimates that in one recent year, fewer than two-tenths of l percent of federal civil service employees were fired.) Instead

38 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

managers tolerate incompetents, transfer them, or bump them upstairs.

Layoffs. When governments reduce their numbers through layoffs, civil service employees with senior- ity can bump those with lesser seniority. Middle managers can bump secretaries who can bump mail room clerks. In the Reagan cutbacks of 1981 , a sec- retary at the Department of Energy who had worked her way up to running a program-and was proud of it-was bumped back to secretary. When New jersey laid off 1,000 employees in 1991,20,000 peo- ple received notices that they might be bumped ....

At the federal level , things may be even worse. Federal employees we know describe colleagues who spend their days reading magazines, planning sailing tri ps, or buying and selling stocks. Scott Shuger, who interviewed several dozen federal employees for the Washington Monthly, found that most estimated the number of "useless personnel'' in their offices at 25 to 50 percent.

The waste in this system is mind-boggling. With 17.5 million civilian government employees (roughly 15 million of them full-time), our public payrolls ap- proaches $500 billion a year. Benefits add anOLher $100 billion or so .... No one can say how much lower our personnel costs could be with a rational sys- tem, but 20 percent is not an outlandish guess ....

The task is less to reform civil service than to de- fine the appropriate personnel system for a modem government and create it. When we ask entrepre- neurial public managers what they would do with civil service, most simply say, "Scrap it and stan over." ...

We obviously need some protection against pat- ronage hiring and fiting. But it is time to listen to our public entrepreneurs and replace a civil service sys- tem designed for the ni neteenth century with a per- sonnel system designed for the twenty-first.

From David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government (Readmg, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992), pp. 110-111, 117-118, 124-130.

SECTION 2 ··~·

The New Theorists on Public Personnel Administration

Among critics of bureaucrats and bureaucracies, some commentators-Osborne and Gaebler are probably the best examples-focus quite specifically on practices in our public service as sources of major inefficiencies. Other analysts argue that public-sector inefficiency isn't peculiar to the civil service but rather represents in extreme form cer- tain deficiencies that are inherent in all large organizations. The most influential of these critics is a group of scholars who are variously called public-choice theorists, rational- choice theorists, or-as we've simply referred to them-New Theorists. These schol- ars draw most of their premises from economic theory. Whereas traditional public administrationists stressed government officials' dedication to some notion of the pub- lic interest, the New Theorists emphasize instead the power of self-interest in human affairs and the consequent need to get incentives right when structuring organizations.

The New Theorists and the Varieties of Incentive Impairment

The New Theorists charge that the very process of forming a hierarchical organi- zation creates conditions which tend to reduce the motivation of workers to give their best. According to the members of this school, civil servants are inefficient not primar- ily because they are governme nt workers but because government work is organized bureaucratically. As our biggest bureaucracy, government is also our least efficient orga-

Public Personnel Administration 39

nization. Bureaucratic organization , the New Theorists point out, severs the link between rewards and performance. Civil servants know that tenure and seniority make it d ifficult to fire them. They also know that position classification procedures make it difficult to promote outstanding performers much in advance of the normal career progression. To ease the resulting motivational dete rrents--called incentive impairments-the New Theorists support a shift in the organizational paradigm so that administrative practice would be pauemed less on the bureaucratic model and more on the image of the free market. In the market, the New Theorists contend, everyone competes, no one has job securi ty, and remuneration is tied to performance. Unlike b ureaucracies, free markets reward energetic and innovative performers with high er profits, and they punish slug- gards and incompetents \vith the threat of bankruptcy.

Adverse Selection, Moral Hazard, and Asymmetric Information

The New Theorists have argued that the c ivil service is acutely susceptible to two forms of incentive impairment, adverse selection and moral hazard. Adverse selection refers to conditions tha t reduce the incentives of outstanding individuals to become civil servants or, if they do enter government work, to remain in the public service. The New Theorists claim that the kinds of workers who seek career cushions rather than career challenges will fee l more comfon able in organizations \vith lockstep promotion patterns and predictable salary graduations. Moral haza rd refers to conditions that impair the incentives of workers to perform with care and diligence. The New Theorists also con- tend that the dangers o f moral hazard inc rease in precisely the kinds of working condi- tions that are characteristic of the civil service.

Adverse selection may operate at several points in the career of a civil servant: at the ini ti al point of career se lection (when a candidate decides whether to app ly for gov- ernment work or to remain in the private sector); at points of possible departure from the civil service (for example, when an offer of higher pay beckons a civil servant to pri- vate industry); and in the course of a layoff affecting the individuals agency: At the point of career selection, the idea is that j obs which carry civil service p rotections inherently invite the lazy or unambitious to ap ply in the first place. An applicant might be moti- vated by the desire to serve. But the motivation might a lso lie in the attractiveness of a job with regular salary rncreases and virtual immunity from firing unless underperfor- mance becomes nagranl.

You probably recall those high school algebra problems in which water pours from a faucet into a cask at a certain rate of inOow while, from the bottom of the cask, water is being drained by a hole that allows a larger rate of outOow. The objective of the exercise is to compute the time it will take for the cask to become empty, taking into account the differential rates of simultaneous inflow and outOow. The theory of adverse selection implies the possibility of a similar phenomenon in the civil service. At the same ti me that adverse selection is allegedly producing a less-capable public workforce through an inOow of poorer-quality applicants, outOows from the ranks of our civil ser- vants may be occurring, \vith outstanding people leaving at a htgher rate than are the less-able workers.

Private employers are constantly trying to entice knowledgeable civil servants by offeri ng higher salaries, better working conditions, and greater opportunities for pro-

40 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

motion. And periodicall]: reducuons m force occur in the public seMce. A senior offi- Cial who receives notice that his or her JOb is to be ehminated in a RIF may have the right to bump a more-junior person . Unfortunately, however, it may be the more-sen ior official who has the poorer record of JOb performance For this reason, bumping rights can make it difficult to reduce the stze of the pubhc-sector workforce except at the cost of eliminating younger workers whom managers want to keep . A kind of adverse selec- tion will then have occurred m which the less quahfied, less energetic workers can use their semonty to d1splace those With the greatest prom1se of future contributions. The critics argue that adverse selection on both the inflo~ and outflow sides can gradually convert a civil sen'lce intended to ensure competence IntO a workforce o f tired hangers- on who are more concerned with security than wllh performance.

The New Theorists argue that once apphcants have been h1red, the assurance of JOb secunty even at substandard levels of performance may mduce them to display moral hazard, a term coined in the insurance industry for an indivtduals tendency to exercise less care 1f an msurer wtll mdemntf) negligent beha\'ior. ln the civil senrice sys- tem, the "msurer" is the government, who \Vtll pa) the tenured worker even when the work itself 1sn't up to snuff. Less work for the same pay, some would suggest, is an a ll- but-inevitable consequence.

Furthermore, the New Theonsts argue that the conditions of work typically en- countered m the ctvtl sen'lce exacl!rbate the problem of moral hazard by creatmg patterns of asymme tric information. Government agenc1es tend to be relatively large bureau- cracies whose employees process highly technical data . But highly technical data can be mastered only by the md1viduals who arc actually processmg specific cases. Those case- workers' superiors can never possess more than a generalized sense of the work done by mdi\'lduals beneath them in the organization. Because the frontline workers know more about their respective JObs than their supeMsors do, workers who are inclined to shirk (that is, mdulge m morally hazardous behavior) rna> be able to do so with im- punity, trusting that their superiors won't ever even know.

Given their acceptance of the theories of adverse selection, moral hazard, and asymmetric informauon , the New Theonsts qunc naturally would prefer a public p er- sonnel system based more on mdividual than on collective evaluations and rewards. They therefore argue that a move in agency orgamzauon toward the free-market para- digm would give pubhc managers greater freedom to h1re and fi re workers based on job qualifications or actual performance Free-market personnel practices would also con- fer greater freedom on workers to demand salanes commensurate \vith the1r contribu- tions rather than at levels fixed b) a pay scale ke)ed to the "rank in the JOb" principle. At minimum, most New Theonsts favor proposals to "deregulate the public service" as a way of freemg up the pubhc sector so that market forces can work. Conversely, the New Thconsts tend to oppose moves to strengthen collective forces in PPA-for exam- ple, moves to increase the influence of pubhc-sector un ions in personnel policy makmg (see Box 2 1).

Are the New Theorists Right?

Arc the New Theorists right? The question ments serious thought and open d is- cussion, if only because the wtdespread mfluence of the New Theorists h as encouraged

Public Personnel Administration 41

BOX 2.1 ----------------1•----•---•~---

T\vo Subthemes in PPA: Deregulation and Public-Sector Collective Bargaining

The critics of traditional PPA contend that even the most dedicated and imaginative government employees may fail under the frustrations of an overregulated public workplace. In 1987 Constance Horner, former director of the federal Office of Person- nel Management, put the case for civil service deregulation:

The size of the government workforce could be substantially reduced if public managers had more flexibility in making basic personnel and purchasing deci- sions, and if lower paperwork requirements freed them to focus more on the ser- vices they are supposed to provide. [There are] tens of thousands of pages of regulations restricting their every move. Federal managers have little discretion to usc pay to reward and retain good employees. As a rule, superior perfor- mance goes unrewarded with better pay. Nor does promotion come more swiftly to workers who show superior commitment and talen t. Sta tus on the basis of seniority is the dominant ethos of civil service administration .... It would be much better if senior managers could get their appropriated budgets and decide how many people to hire, at what pay level. to get the job done.•

Pressures have long been felt to relax appointment procedures, permit public managers a freer hand to fire mediocre performers, and increase flexibility in job assignment, promotion practices. and pay scales. Dozens of experiments along these lines have been tried, with mixed success. Early in the Clinton presidency, Vice- President AI Gore, in his capacity as director of a major initiative to "reinvent govern- ment," announced yet another effort to adopt resu lts-oriented personnel policies.

The issue of workplace flexibi lity runs directly into the issue of public-sector unionism. since the matter of on-the- job working cond iti ons plays a relative ly larger role in government collective bargaining than it does in p ri vate industry. Overa ll today, some 35 percent of the state and local public workforce is unionized. The pattern of union membership, however, is highly uneven both across the nation and among dif- ferent occ upational classifications. Some state and loca l public-service sectors (fire, police, education, sanitation) are more heavily unionized than others. By contrast, doc- tors, lawyers, and other service professionals have often resisted union com mitments that they feared would bra nd them as "blue collar" or, indeed, as less than fully "pro- fessional." This partly explains why the increase in public- sector union membership at the federal level over the past few decades has occu rred primarily in the lower grades. (It should be emphasized, however, that the main federal collective bargaining organization, the American Federation of Government Employees-AFGE- includes white-collar as well as blue-collar employees.) The percentage of dues-paying federal

' "Beyond Mr. Gradgrind, " Polity Revietv (Spring 1988): 34-35.

42 Public Administration: The Pro fession and the Practice

workers also varies widely from agency to agency. averaging by some estimates around 10 percent, although as many as 60 percent of federal civil servants may be in work un its covered by co llective bargaining agreements.

Most personnel experts foresee both bad and good news for public-sector unions in the near future. The bad news applies mainly at the state and local levels, where some nasty bills have begun to come due for bargains that union leaders successfully negotiated decades ago . In the 1960s and 1970s, some governors, county executives, a nd big-city mayors granted hefty pay raises and generous benefits to their unionized employees. ("Fringes" are traditionally high in the public sector, partly as compensa- tion for salar ies that tend to be low relative to those of comparable private-sector workers.) But these negotiated wage levels couldn't a lways be sustained. In time, some un ion leaders had to concede "givebacks." Then workers covered by the earlier agreements began retiring, often needing increased levels of medical attention as they aged . Their employers-cities w hich were often themselves financ ially troubled be- cause of s hrink ing tax bases- had difficulty fund ing promised fringe benefits. The si t- ua tion bodes to get worse before it gets better.

At the fede ral level, the main problem in managemen t-labor relations ha s taken a somewha t differen t for m. Congress determi nes federal civil servants' pay scales, a nd so union leaders have bargained ma inly for favorable agency working conditions and better protections from the cla ssification system itself. In early 1993, President Cli n- ton pledged to create a federal bureaucracy th a t "works better and costs less. " But t he Clinton reinven tion in itiative couldn 't s ucceed w ithou t s u pport from federa l employ- ees. The President ordered all federal agencies to set up "partnership cou ncils" with representatives of organized labor. Subjects that were tradi tionally excluded from co l- lective bargaining become mandatory topics of negot ia ti o n, including issues relati ng to the numbers, types, grade levels. organ izational div isions. and work methodologies of e mployees in federal units. Some observers suspected that President Clinton had privately cut a deal with AFGE leaders. Under it, the government would in time per- mit public employees' union s to bargain over sa laries. In exchange, the AFGE leaders would tacitly support the Clinton plan to cut the federal workforce a nd move toward the human resource approach by simplifying civil service rules.

• •• some of the bureaucrat bashing thats become common in recent years. Answers can come aL three levels of analysis.

First, there are the findings of scholars other than New Theorists who have tried to assess both the qualny of civil servants as workers and the average efficiency levels of government programs. We've a lready considered Charles Goodsells claim that the imag- ery of ctvil servants as drones or malingerers is rooted in myth, not fact. Others have s upported Goodsell's side of the argument. Arthur Speigel, a Harvard Business School consultant called in during the 1970s to overhaul one of the nations mos t hidebound and complex bureaucracies, the New York City Department of Human Setvices, has em- phasized the willingness and ability of professional civll servants to respond to higher directives-on condition that the directives lie within a zone of reasonableness: "I expe- rienced several p leasant surprises in dealing with the civil service. First, their support was available. lt hmged on four factors--proof of our competence, the m ayors backing

Public Personnel Administration 43

of our effon, our respect for their standard bureaucratic procedures, and insight into the mutuality of our objectives." Speigel added that he and his shaker-uppers "found a rich- ness of management talent buried under the civil servi.ce promotion system. By work- ing around the regulations, we were able to put these people into the strategic positions that called for professionals.'"~ (Note, however, that as Spiegel tells the story, the regula- tions d idn't help the political leaders activate the latent cap abilities of the professional administrators; the regulations had to be circumvented if the capacities of the perma- nent personnel were to be fully realized.)

Second, there is the test of experience and instinct. The New Theory assumes a cynical view of human nature- that workers in large numbers seek out jobs where they can be lazy (adverse selection) and that employees will routinely take advantage of in- formational asymmetries to goof off on the job (moral hazard). These arguments don't ultimately rest on hard data but instead appeal to some peoples beliefs about human behavior. Does the picture of o rganizational li fe as presented by the New Theorists cor- respond to your own observations and experiences? ln what respects does it ring true, and in what ways does it oversimplify or even falsify the pattern of human motivations? (We'll return to some of these questions in Chapter 10.)

Third, if our public-sector bureaucracies suffer from inefficiency, the reasons might not be that inferior employees take advantage of incentive-Impairing conditions but that well -qualified, conscientious civil servants must d iven their energies to deal with a surfeit of procedures, bureaucratic rules, and demands imposed by decision mak- ers from without the organization.

Anhur ll. Spiegel Ill, "!low Outsiders Overhauled a Public AgenC)·," Harvard Busmcss Review 53 Uanuary- Fcbruary 1975): 116, 120.

CHAPTER READING

The following selection, by Frank]. Thompson of the State University of New Yo rk a t Albany, explicitly raises the issu e of competing criteria in the field of PPA and, implic- itly, the problem of overdetermination. Thompson suggests that the discontent which is so comm only voiced by critics of the civil servi.ce ultimately reOects value ju dgments- that is, peoples different weightings assigned to different values. As we'll sec in our chap- ter case, the difficulties that public administrators encounter when they engage in pri- ority setting a re perhaps nowhere more acute than in civil servi.ce decision making.

Five Competing Values in Civil Service Systems Frank]. Thompson

Certarn core valu es compete for expression in dvil service systems: instrumental goals, merit, political responsiveness, soda/ equity, employee rights and well-being. In essence, discontent springs from the inabil- ity to forge a consensus on the appropriate weight to be assigned to particular values-to define the opti- mal mix of achievement on the various d1mc11Sions.

44 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

In managing human resources, public adminis- trators tend to operate within civil service systems. These systems refer to the formal structures of authoritative rules that govern personnel practices in government programs and activities. Some pub- lic managers in very small jurisdictions do not, in any meaningful sense, manage human resources in the context of these systems, but in most lo- cal governments of any size, and certainly at the state and federal levels, civil service systems markedly influence the day-to-day management of personnel.

Reformers of various stripes have not underesti- mated the importance of civil service systems. The struggle against the spoils politics of the late nine- teenth century evoked intense feelings and impas- sioned rhetoric. The Pendleton Act of 1883 forged the basic template for the spread of merit systems throughout the country. ...

The new merit systems spawned their own dis- contents .... A study sponsored by Ralph Nader re- ferred to federal personnel practices as The Spoiled System. Two top administrators in New York City government suggested that the city's personnel practices were "meritless. " They claimed that the city's civil service system produced "mindless bureaucracies that appear to function for the conve- nience of their staffs rather than the public." They concluded that the city's personnel system had developed "rigor mortis"; it had "been warped and distorted to the point where it can do hardly any- thing at all." Discontent with civil service systems also found expression in the common view that public organizations lack the efficiency and effec- tiveness of their counterparts in the private sector. This belief fueled the privatization initiatives of the 1980s, which, among other things, urged that gov- ernments work be arranged through contracts with the private sector.

Most people who have spent any time working in the public sector sense that the criticisms of civil ser- vice systems are often excessive. Effective human resource management does occur in public agencies. Nevertheless, expressions of discontent with civil service systems occur with enough regularity to d e- mand attention ....

Competing Values

Certain core values compete for expressio n in civil service systems .... [ 0 I ne can make a strong case for focusing on five basic values: instrumental goals, merit, political responsiveness, social equity, and employee rights and well-being. At times, the per- ceived performance of civil service systems with respect of any one of these values has prompted dis- content to simmer and, less frequently, to boil over into a reform initiative. • Civil service systems can facilitate or impede the efforts of public managers to accomplish instrumen- tal goals-economy (cost containment) , efficiency (as expressed in the ratio of output to cost), and effec- tiveness (achievement of program goals). In cities with political machines, the absence of merit systems has often forced public managers to put up with many marginally ski lled or incompetent employees. This situation has heightened the risk that city agen- cies would be inefficient and ineffective.

More recent criticism holds that civil service sys- tems impeded instrumental achievement by under- mining managerial discretion. Some analysts see the restrictive character of government's personnel sys- tems as the critical difference between managing in public and private organizations. The rules embed- ded in civil service systems presumably hamstring managers, who would otherwise use discretion over personnel decisions to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of agencies' operations. Nowhere can one find a more piercing expression o f this view than in a report released by the National Academy of Pub- lic Administration. ln reviewing federal personnel practices, the report noted that the Federal Personnel Manual had 8,814 pages, and that the personnel sys- tem "does not seem to work very well for anybody." According to the report, "executives and managers feel almost totally divorced from what should be one of their most important systems." The report called for substantial deregulation of government managers and stressed that the U.S. Office o f Personnel Man- agement should delegate more authority to line departments.

Among other effects, restrictions on managerial discretion allegedly make it more difficult to moti-

vate employees. Observing practices in New York Cily, Savas and Ginsburg charged that promolion tests robbed managers of opportunities to motivate subordinates; they further asserted that "the knowl- edge that it is almost impossible to penalize or dis- charge the barely competent or even incompetent permanent employee" is "demoralizing for supervi- sors." At the state level, a survey of top executives found 30 percent who indicated that they faced seri- ous or very serious problems in disciplining or dis- missing inept employees. These observations, from all levels of government, echo a common theme: that the rules of civil service dampen motivation because they weaken relationships between perfor- mance, on the one hand, and pay, promotion, disci- plinary actions, and firing, on the other. Ln a related vein, Golembiewski focused on job design and de- scription in argumg that civil service systems "fail to respond to the need to facilitate the management of work by mcreasing supervisory power." Exces- sively constraining rules march hand in hand with the charge that much of public personel adminis- tration represents the triumph of technique over purpose.

Merit is a second core value. Meritocratic nonns have deep roots in the classic, liberal tradition of the United States. ln the case o f personnel, they e mpha- size that rewards ought to go to the most competent individuals-those with the best records of or poten- tial for achievement. A sense of society as a market, where individuals compete and prizes go to the most adroit, undergirds this view. Therefore, strong semi- mem and legal requirements often insist that public managers hire the most competent people from pools of eligible applicams. More recemly, various policies have called for managers to allocate pay in- creases to the most meritorious performers.

While civil service systems often promote merit ideas, the 1960s and the 1970s witnessed countless accusations that the systems left much to be desired in this regard. Recruitment policies, in particular, came under fire. Hiring practices in the past had clearly excluded many well -qualified applicants on the grounds of race and sex. Moreover, very few civi l service tests had been strictly validated (proved pre- dictive) via scientific research. Thus, in reviewing the

Public Personnel Administration 45

situation in New York City, Savas and Ginsburg noted that out of four hundred civil service exami- nat ions, "not a single case could be found where the validity of a written test ... was ever proved." More- over, merit hiring practices sometimes had unamici- pated consequences. Ln New York City, delays between the scoring of tests and the actual hiring of individuals produce a situation in which cand idates with low passing grades were more likely to be hired than those with high er marks.

The value of political responsiveness asserts that the preferences of elected officials and their appoimees ought to weigh heavily in personnel management. The civil service reform movement of the late nine- teenth century grew up in an effort to reduce the weight assigned to one form of political responsive- ness, that associated with spoils systems. Spoils aimed primarily at maintaining the electoral coalition that had allowed politicians to stay in office by providing patronage in the routine, lower-level jobs of govern- ment. The institutions spawned by civil service reform made the practice of such patronage more di!Ticu lt. Wriuen tests for employment, quite (!Side from their capacity to predict the b est person fo r a job, made it harder (although by no means impossible) for elected officials to practice patronage. "Independent" civil service commissions served a similar function. Wh ile some manifestations of low-level patronage politics persist, th e spoils system is not a major rally- ing point for reform in the current era. For instance, one su rvey of over eight hundred state executives found that only 5 percent viewed patronage in filling positions as a serious problem.

In another sense, however, issues of political re- sponsiveness remain on the from burner. The rise of the administrative state presents perplexing issues of accountability and control in a democracy. How can the elected representatives of the people ensure that government administrators remain sensitive to their concerns and not become autonomous power hold- ers? More specifically, what role should personnel administration play in t he quest fo r such responsive- ness? In this regard, top policy jobs in the bureau- cracy tend to be a central target of concern, as elected officials strive to p lace loyal people in strategically sensitive positions ....

46 Public Administration: The Pro fession and the Practice

Civil service systems can, however, tip the bal- ance too far in the direction of this form of political responsiveness. Democracy requires not only responsiveness but also nonpartisan technical com- petence and respect for law among public managers. In this regard, some observers criticize civil service systems for facilitating too much political respon- siveness. They see many top political appointeees as transient birds of passage, who all too frequently possess minimal qualifications for the JObs they hold and whose zealotry can lead to an administration that departs from both the spirit and the letter of the law. These observers note how heavy emphasis on political responsiveness can yield declining appreCI- ation of caree r civil servants' professional expertise. In tum, morale among these civil servants may plummet, and turnover may increase. Administra- tive capacity thereby diminishes. These observers hold that civil servants, within the bounds set by law, will usually attempt to be responsive to their politi- cal masters. CiVIl servants understand that a political executive who goes too far in seeking to control per- sonnel processes may paradoxically wind up with administrators who are unresponsive-not because they lack loyalty, but because they lack the skill to carry out the executives \vishes.

Social equity concerns the uses of government em- ployment practices to help groups who are deemed disadvantaged or potentially disadvantaged. One variation on this concern involves the declaration that certain characteristics of groups are off limits in personnel decisions, an acuon that helps protect these groups from adverse discrimination. job appli- cants, for instance , generally enjoy the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of being Cathohc or fifty years old. Another version of this commit- ment to social equity goes beyond protection to rep- resentation. In this regard , various affirmative action plans have urged government officials to seck out and hire women and mmorities. Other groups, such as veterans and the handicapped, have also received preferential treatment in the name of social equity.

Social equity concerns are sometimes at the heart of the criticisms and legal actions directed against civil service systems. Protected groups, such as women and minorities, frequently complain that the prac-

tices embedded in these systems continue to perpet- uate injustice . Others complain because civil service systems do not officially recognize their characte ris- tics as deserving of protection or proactive treatmen t. Hence, gay rights leaders charge that civil service sys- tems permit discrimination against gay and lesbian applicants and employees. From another perspec- tive, white male job applicants sporadically complain of not having obtained employment or promotion because of so-called reverse discrimination.

Employee rights and well-being also constitute a salient value in ctvil service systems. A pervasive norm , buttressed in many instances by law and reg- ulation , asserts that an individual enjoys certain sub- stantive and procedural rights as an employee of an organization. These rights increase to the degree that four conditions, among others, hold. First, they expand to the extent that rules limit the reasons for which executives can take actions (firing, demotion) perceived as adve rse to employee interests. For instance, laws often constrain public executives from punishing subordinates for engaging in certain activ- ities off the job, such as contributing money to polit- ical campaigns. Second, employee rights grow as th e procedures (for example, appeals systems) for taking adverse action become more elaborate and place a greater burden of proof on executives. Third, em- ployee rights loom larger when employees with more semority in an agency enjoy greater protection from adverse acuon than employees with less senior- ity. Fourth, employee rights grow as formal proce- dures reqUire executi\·es to consult or bargain \vith official represemanves of subordmates (say, union leaders) over a broader scope of issues. Beyond these formal safeguards, the notion of employee well-being implies a concern with the quality o f work life. Work that provtdes employees with psychological gratifi- cation and promotes their physical well-being goes to the heart of this concern.

Some c riticize civil service systems for being ex- cessively deferential with respect of employee rights. Among other thmgs, employees are allegedly too hard to fire or lay off. Seniority, critics claim, receives excessive weight in decisions. Skirmishes over these and related issues erupt sporadically. Other critics, however, charge that civil service systems fail to

demonstrate sufficient respect for employee rights and well-being. For instance, concern over drug usc and AIDS in the 1980s had fueled debate over employee rights to control who can moniLOr their physical condition. Guidelines issued by President Reagan required federal agencies to test designated employees for mariJuana and cocaine use. The guidelines permitted employees to provide urine samples wuhout observation, unless agency officials believed that subordmates would alter or substitute sam ples. To guard against such "cheating," the guide- Lines recommended such steps as the use of blui ng agents in the toilet water at testing sites, to prevent employees from diluting their samples. Union lead- ers denounced the plan as "tidy-bowl justice" and a violation of the constitutional rights of employees ....

Th e Optimal Mix. These five core values of the personnel arena have several implications for those who seek to assess civil service systems and the prac- tices of human resource managers. In some in-

CHAPTER CASE

Public Pcrs01m e l Administration 47

stances, a given personnel practice does not serve any of the core values well. In other cases, a practice may promote all of them .... The presence of trade- offs means that civil service systems run the risk of being "damned if they do and damned if they don't. " ln essence, discontent springs from the inability to forge a consensus on the appropriate weight to be assigned to particular values- to define the optimal mix of achievement on the various d imensions. This inab il ity to reach consensus means that reform movements often contain the seeds of new discon- tent and assume a cyclical pattern. When some reformers succeed in causing civil service systems to increase their emphasis on certain values (for exam- ple, more political responsiveness), they prompt oth- ers to seek change on behalf of other core concerns (merit, for example, or instrumental goals) ... .

From Frank J Thompson, "Manag~ng wnhin Ct\il Servtce Sys- tems," m James L Perry, ed., Handbook of Public AclministratJon (San Francisco: j ossey-Bass, 1989), pp. 359-366, 368-372

......

••• Today federal, state, and most local government agencies of any size rely on career public-sector employees to conduct the day-to-day business of government. In the civil service, we find the vast majority of our fellow citizens who qualify for the title of pub- lic administrator. In the c1vil service, we probably also find th e most rule-bound sector of the entire American workforce. The resulting tension has been a major theme in our discussion of public personnel administ ration. Arguably, the central challenge in PPA LOday is to develop administrative capacity suitable for modem circumstances (that per- sonnel system designed for the twenty-first century which Osborne and Gaebler sought), while recognizing that long-established rules and traditions make change diffi- cult m the civil service. Many civil servants oppose any weakening of these rules and traditions, since they protect the employee rights and well-being that Frank Thompson emphasized in his discussion of public-sector personnel plan ning.

The pervasive tension between the striving for results an d the in hibiung effect of rules frames any survey of modern public admmistration. We find th1s tension in the fo llo\ving scenario, which introduces Mary Manengrove and tells us something about the geographic area and formal organization-the St. Croix Development Commis- sion-m wh1ch Mary works. Closely interlocked \vith the work of the commission are

48 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

the activities of the dominant fed eral agen C) m the St. C roix region , the U.S De part- ment of Agriculture ("the USDA" to most locals). Thts mte rdependency leads to Mary Manengrove's involvement in an acu on that the m aJor figure in the scenano, USDA county coordinawr Roman Dmda, h as under way; Dmda has the u npleasant job of preparing for a RIF in the local workforce.

As you read through the case mate rials, look with some care at the excerpts from the official federal RIFfing regulations. Thetr la nguage may seem awkward-bureaucratic gobbledygook. But d ectphenng bureaucratese (both whats explicit and whats between the lines) often proves to be an important pan o f the lived experience of administration. Similarly, you're likely to find the densely arrayed numbers in the retention registers to be cryptic and off-putting. But remember, case analysis requires close attention to the details. The details that really count often come in precisely the forms illustrated by these excerpts from federal personnel rules and sample rete nuon tables. (By the way, you m ight be su rprised at how much you can infer about the lives, talents, and vulnerabtliues of "the sisters" in the story-Ltef Pink, Bobbte Boo, and Ltsa Hepburn-from a careful study of the numerical data in the re tenuon registers. There's a lesson in that fact , too.)

A fi\la l caveat: At one point Guy Strumi , a figure m the scenario, muses on the :'twisty-tumy" thought processes o f his boss, a public-sector u nion lead er named Walt March. Marchs convoluted reasoning results fro m hts decision to approach the tmpend- ing RlF strategically, b ased on calculattons of the fo llowing son: "If I d o this and my opponent does that , the resu lts will be s uch-and-such ; on the other hand , if I d o some- th ing else and my opponents counters with ... " and so forth , a nd so forth. Calculations of this kind are usually hard to fo llow unless the variou s combinations of strategies are carefully sorted out and re presented in some simple way. One objective o f the scenario is to set up the quest for that simple way of seeing the strategic situation in which Walt March finds himself.

CASE 1

Cutback M anagement in the St. Croi x: A RI F in th e USDA

The Upper St. Cro ix River rises in two bra nches out of the bogla nds of Apostle County in northwest Wisconsin . The Upper St. Croix wa tershe d e mbra ces a n a rea of rela ti vely low-i mpact developme nt- mostly seasona l- use c abin s, fis hing camps, and s ma ll resorts, plus a s ma ll ma nufactu ring opera tio n. Po lari s Corporation's o ld wood-pulp processing p la nt at Ha lf Day Ril l. Fro m its headwate rs, the St. Croix a ng les in a south- westerly di rection through some of the best fres hwate r fi shing lakes in North Amer- ica. It reaches a p o int o n the Wiscon si n-Minn esota boundary abo ut 60 miles above Minn eapolis- St. Pau l, the Twin Cities. There th e river itself becomes t he border be- tween the two sta tes. The re, too, it becomes one of the most s pectacularly scenic wate rwa ys o n the co ntinent , a ru s hing fl ow e nclosed by more tha n 25 m iles of deep gorge, inte rru pte d a t be nd after be nd by rapid s. and e ncl osed by overlooks of d e nse hardwood fo liage.

A few m iles south of Mi nneapolis- St. Pau l, th e St. Croix pays its own tribute to the Mississippi River, whic h ha s cut through the Twin Citi es from the no rthwest . Th e reafter, t he St. Croix ts no more, having joined the g rea t river w hic h marks the

Public Personnel Administration 49

Lake Superior

City of Dulut h MN @ ® City of S uperior WI

® Tamarack Incinerator

Norton County MN Apostle County WI

} Go''' of th< St. Ceo;,

Larch City ®

Larch County MN Burnt County WI

Mis5issippi River St. Croix River

Sketch 2.1 The Four-County Region Known as "The St. Croix"

boundary between Wisconsin and Minnesota from its point of confluence with the St. Croix southward (see Sketch 2.1 ).

The St. Croix has given its name to the four-county area that it drains (Norton and Larch counties on the Minnesota side of the border, Apostle and Burnt counties in Wisconsin). The "mini- twin cities" of Duluth and Superior, on Lake Superior, lie just beyond t he northern border of the four-county area. From the southern edge of the four-county region, it 's a 30-m ile drive on Interstate 35 to Minneapolis-St. Paul. Within the area are dozens of m ink ra nches and tree farms, a well-developed com- munity college system, a medi um-security federal prison at Vikingsholm, Minnesota (there's also a second federal correctiona l institution in Duluth) , and perhaps three dozen market-center towns of varying sizes. Only three bridges cross the Upper St. Croix within the four-county region, so there's not as m uch travel as you might sup- pose back and forth between the two states. Yet common problems and shared eco- nomic interests cause both the Minnesotans and the Wisconsinites, in general, to

50 Public Administration: The Profession and the PraCLice

think of themselves for most purposes as residents of an identifiable area. They cus- tomarily refer to the region simply as "the St. Croix."

• • • • • Not too many decades ago. the economic base of the St. Croix was agricultural.

There was some logging. especially on the Wisconsin side (where substantial num- bers of folks continue to count on paychecks earned in silviculture, lumbering. and wood pulping). Mink ranches dot the region. and, of course. many natives of the St. Croix trap seasonally for fox, lynxcat, c1nd muskrat. But the traditional foundation of the four-county region's prosperity had rested, in the main, on its dairy farms.

Folks joked that troubles had begun "when Carter killed the cows." Un der Presi- dent Jimmy Carter, officials of the USDA decided to deplete the nation 's dairy herds as a way of reducing overproduction of milk. butter, and cheese. Many eligible dairyfarm- ers in the St. Croix area took up the USDA's offer to buy their cows and dispose of them. Within a few years, however. residents of the four-county region recognized that they had lost an important part of the local culture. The f<1rmers never found a way to con- vert tli.::ir one-time infusion of federal funds into a continui ng cash flow. Mink ranch - ing and expanded tree farming couldn't offset the deficit left by the sell-off of the herds.

For some ye<~rs after "Carter killed the cows," local business and professional people had been promoting a "coordin<Jted approach" (whatever that meant) to eco- nomic recovery. The message went from town to town that the area 's Kiwanians and Lions and Rotarians were ready for a concerted effort on the region's behalf-if only someone would take the initiative. In 1984 Andy Byce. a consulting engineer and sur- veyor with offices in Larch City. proposed that all members of area service organiza- tions chip in to set up a clearinghouse for information.

"I know, from our surveying work," Byce asserted, "that there's federa l money from the Environmental Protection Agency we can get for some anti-pollution or water treatment projects. and I think the Corps of Engineers might have some money to put up too. Ellen ~toe [the Minnesota congresswoman from the area] ... she'll help. as always. to bring money from Washington into the district." What about the Small Business Adm inistration: Doesn't it make grants? And of course the USDA itself had tons of programs and subsidies. All you had to do was know what was availab le, put together a credible plan, and collect the money. Byce convinced area bankers, lawyers, and realtors to kick in the necessary seed money. Byce himself agreed to chair the St. Croix Growth Council.

In the late I 980s, the county commissioners and county managers' in the St. Croix region collectively decided that the Growth Council should be expanded and

Outside of New England-and certainly In the midwestern states-counties arc extremely important units of local governance. In most areas of the United States, the senior elected county officials are called ·com- missioners.· although other t1tles are also used. such as frecho/cfer and (as in most Wisconsin counties) supervisor. Many counties around the country also have an appointed professional county manager or county executive, whose main duties are executive in nature. These managers run day-to-day county oper- ations subject to the oversight of the commissioners. When speaking of matters relating to the four-county development commission, residents of the St. Croix region have fallen into the habit of using the more com- mon generic terms for officials whose formal titles vary somewhat from state to state and even county to county. Thus. citizens speak of ··commissioners" when referring to their county-level legislators. although those officials In Wisconsin would properly be called "supervisors," and they speak of ·managers" in all four counties. even though Norton County's senior executive official has the formal title of county executive.

Apostle County WI County

Commi55ioner:; I

Apo5tle County

Manager

Public Personnel Administration

Burnt County WI County

Commi55ioner5

I

I

Norton County MN Larch County MN County County

Commi55ioner5 Commi55ioner5 I I

The St. Croix Development Commission

r

Burnt County

Manager

I

Norton County

Manager

I

Larch County

Manager

Director of Planning (Anton Kurva5zy)

Director of Operations (Denni5 Hammer)

I External Relations (8 FTEs)

~ A55i5tant (Mary Martengrove)

I Development

Planning• (10 FTE5)

I Emergency

Medical Service (30 FTEs)

1--- Assistant (Boyd Britten)

I AdultNocational

Education (27 FTEs)

• Formerly the St. Croix Growth Council, the privately organized and privately funded boo5ter organization headed by Andy Byce.

Sketch 2.2 Organization of the St. Croix Development Commission

51

professional ized by making it an official arm of a new four-county developmen t commi ssion. Henceforth , each county manager would wear two hats. Each wo uld continue to supervise hi s or her own county's court services, oversee the sheriff's department, collect loca l taxes, and so forth (hat 1). Additionally, each county man - ager wou ld serve by formal appointment as a commissio ner on th e newly created St. Croix Development Commission , or SCDC (hat 2).

The four-member SCDC met every other week with a director of planning and a director of operations. Together, these six framed coordinated policies in four areas of governmental activity: gran t applications prepared by t he SCDC's Division of Externa l Relation s, general economic development plan ning. regio nal emergency medical ser- vice, and adu lt/ vocationa l educa tion. The SC DC staff had grown to a total of seventy- nin e full- time equiva lent (FTE) employees, organi zed as show n in Sketch 2.2 .

T he SCDC's planning di rector, Anton Kurvaszy, had come to the St. Croix from so mewhere in the so utheast. His two units occupied a suite of offices in the Jackson

52 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

Professional Building in Larch City, the county seat of Larch County. Kurvaszy often thanked him self for having had the sense to hire as his staff aide a native of the St. Croix region, Mary Martengrove, fresh out of the public administration program at the Universi ty of W isconsin-Eau Claire, to be his staff assistant.

• • • • • Mary Martengrove knew that just about every county seat in the states of Min-

nesota and Wisconsin had its own version of the jackson Building, a central place wi th office space for both businesses and government officials. Not many years earlier, four Larch City lawye rs w ith so me extra cash to invest had financed the construction of thi s new "professio nal building." The lawyers took th e best locations for themselves and offered the remain ing space for ren t. Congresswo man Moe kept an office for con- stituent services on th e first floor; the congresswoman's local representative, Dagmar Blaine, mai ntained a full -time presence there. The p lanning division of the SCDC also had its suite on the ground floor, along with some local engineers and surveyors (including Andy Byce and hi s partner, Boyce Winkwiak) who worked out of the jack- son building. "White-Co llar Walt" March was a main shaker in the local chapter of the America n Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the barga ini ng agent for many of the federal workers across northern Minnesota and Wisconsin . March also rented space in the jackson Bu ilding. His travels kept h im from spending much time there, but most days you cou ld find his assista nt, Guy Strum i, in the AFGE office.

Th e other renters we re all government officia ls. Next door to the SCDC offices on one side was the USDA's Soi l Conserva tion Service office. Down the corridor was where the Agriculture Extension field-workers hung out w hen they weren't criss-crossing the region " jawing" w ith mink or pou ltry ranchers. From the SCDC offices going the other way, you reached the doo r of the USDA program coordinator, Roman Drnda.

Upstairs in the jackson Building was a five- room layout where " t he we lfa re" administered the Socia l Security disability program, Medicaid, and so forth . "The wel- fare " was a collective term used by most St. Croix residents when they referred to employees of the federa l Department of Health and Human Services. "The welfare" folks from HHS also worked in close coordina tion w ith state and county officers administering shared programs such as the old federal-state Aid to Families with Dependent Children program . Next to "the welfa re" were offices for food stamps and the local Commodity Credit Corporation, both USDA programs. Traffic to and from the CCC was especia lly heavy at planting and harvest times, when farmers signed up for federal crop subsidy p rogra m s, and agai n toward the end of the growing year, when they returned to claim benefits under the CCC's nonrecourse loan programs.2

Nearly everyone in the ja ckson Building knew everyone else 's first name. And of course they all knew about th e looming problem that would end up touching every- one in the St. Croix-th e Impending RIF in the USDA.

' Nonrecourse /ann progrnm: Traditionally, many of the subsidies administered by the Department of Agricul - ture have taken the form of loans made to farmers on the understanding that all or part of the debt Incurred would be forgiven If the farmer's crop didn't fetch a specified price at harvest time. In that event, the U.S. government would ·have no recourse'" to the money that the farmer cou ld keep as a form of price support. In 1996, Congress passed a law changing the structure of the price-support program. The new legislation provides for a slow phaseout of many forms of nonrecourse loans.

Public Personnel Administration 53

Roman Drnda, w ho was going to have to "ru n the RIF," had spent twenty-five years in agricu lture. Early in his career, he'd moved from extension work in Iowa, Min- nesota, and Wisconsin to a stint w ith the American Farm Bureau Federation (the nation's leading agribusiness trade association and lobbying organization). From the AFBF Drnda had gone on to a job at one of the University of M innesota's agricultural research stations. Drnda had th en worked in the USDA's Washington headquarters office befo re moving in to his present position. As county coordinator of all farm pro- grams in a troubled area of the country, Drnda in effect fu nctioned as the local spokesperson, ch ief negotiator, and occasional "hatchet man" for Secretary of Agri- cu lture Nyby himself.

Because any problem affecting agriculture also affected prospects for economic growth in the region. the rumored RIF order also became the official concern of Anton Kurvaszy in hi s capacity as plann ing director of the St. Croix Development Commis- sion. Drnda had asked Kurvaszy. representing the SCDC; Dagmar Blaine of Congress- woman Moe's staff; and Chris Clairy from the office of Wisconsin state senator Ben Loffel to meet informally at the Golden Gopher Grill for a discussion of the expected cutback order. As a courtesy to Walt March, Drnda also included Guy Strumi. And at Anton Kurvaszy 's req uest, Mary Martengrove would also attend, bringing the number at the Golden Gopher meeting to six.

• • • • • In farming circles around the country, there's a familiar joke:

A civ il serva nt of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is seen standing on Independence Avenue in Washington, next to the USDA building, weeping uncontrollably. A compassionate passerby asks the official what hap- pe ned. T he bureaucra t replies: "My farmer died."

No one around the tabl e with Roman Drnda retold the old joke. No one had to. Over th e years since the sell -off of the herds, the overall population in the St.

Croix-abou t 120,000 souls-held almost steady. But the number of active farmers steadily decl ined. All the w hile, the number of USDA technical special ists remained as it had been w hen many t imes the curren t number of farm ers were being se rviced. Meanwhile, the number of USDA employees w ho performed socia l service functions was increasing apace with the increased need to administer federally supported relief programs (food stamps and the rest). People in th e know realized that the personnel trend had long alarmed the bureaucracy watchers in Washington, especially among the would-be b udget cutters in Congress.

Drnda sa id to the group asse mbled at the Golden Gopher: "Study commission after com mi ssion has recommended that we downsize Agricultu re. For years, con- gressmen and congresswomen horsetraded wi th one anoth er to protect USDA offices and jobs in their districts. No longer, I'm afraid."

Dagmar Blaine confirmed Drnda's opinion: "I got it from Ellen [Congresswoman Moe] herse lf this morning on the phone. Nyby's signing the RIF order today. That means Ellen w ill get her courtesy advance soon, maybe tomorrow .... "

Courtesy advance? Mary Martengrove didn't know the term.

54 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

"As a courtesy to M.C.s [Members of Congress]," Blaine explain ed, "a depa rt- mental secretary 'consults' with them before closi ng facilities in their districts. W hat that means is, the secretary se nd s a copy of the orders before they go to th e field."

"So the M.C. can make the ann ouncement?" Blaine laughed. "The M .C. makes the announcement w hen there's a new facility

to be built. When it's an old one to be closed, she lets th e secretary-in this case, Secretary of Agriculture Nyby-put out the na sty news. T hen the M.C. blasts the action as 'heartless, ill-advised, penny-wise-and-pound-foolish ... .' Pick any other adjectives. "

"What exactly's in the RIF order ?" state sena tor Loffel's man, Chris Clairy, asked Ornda.

"Word is, we 'll have to let go I in 3." No one around the table envied Drnda's job-to decide who wou ld be fired.

Drnda continu ed: " Here 's some background : The USDA has seventy-fo ur employees, in all. in th e St. Croix. Scheduled retiremen ts, combined wi th clear lines of bumping rights, shou ld make the RIF pretty straightforward for the very-senior peo- ple, the very-junior peop le, and for the clerica ls and custodi als. Everyone alrea dy knows who'l l have to go (the newes t workers) or w ho 's already plan ning to go (pe nd- ing retirees, whose attrition shou ld pretty mu ch give us our quota of layoffs, at least in those categories) . The tough problem is with thirty- nine APTs we have in grades GS-9 through GS- 14. On the 1- in-3 basis, thirteen of those thirty- nin e wi ll be let go. Of those thirty- nin e, however, seven arc service veterans. For pra ctica l purposes, th eir jobs are protected-unless, of course, some of them are put in special competitive lev- els of their own.

"So, say we set aside the seven ve ts," Ornda continued, "leaving thirty-two problematic cases. Those thirty- two w ill have to take the entire 1-out-of-3 hit as we downsize from our thirty-nin e APTs to a staff of twenty - six. The question is: Who should be let go? Or-what's almost the sa me question-what kinds of jobs sho uld the remaining APT staff be tailored to perform in the St . Croix after all th e ripple effects of the RIF have washed away?"

Drnda distributed a paper. "Here's a worksheet showing my guesses about the thirteen individual s among the thirty-two nonveterans who , after bumping, are likely to lose their jobs" (sec Table 2. 1) .

In multiple column s, Ornda had noted each individ ual 's civil service grade, gen- der, veteran's statu s (or lack of it) , and job category: an F for workers w ho spend time mostly in the field givi ng hands-on advice to farmers, fur ranchers, and silvicu ltural- ists; an A for administrative employees who special ize in office-based paperwork- processing price-support and acreage-reduction forms for subsidies, and the like; an S for employees in social wo rk, such as the second-floor workers in the food stamp group or the WIC co un se lors. (Women, Infants, and Children, a program for nutri- ti ona l supplements). Ornda 's worksheet also showed each worker's job location by state, years of se rvice, and average of the last three performan ce ratings on t he stan- d ard federa l civil se rvice 1-5 sca le. And although he worried about crea ting a wr itten record of factors that might be inappropriate to consider in th e impending RIF, Ornda had also added marks showing which workers are Native Americans or members of other minority groups.

Public Personnel Administration 55

Table 2.1 Roman Drnda's Worksheet : Tentative Retention Register for 39 St. Croix Region A PT-Level Employees

General Schedule M / F Job Average Job Performance Regis ter

(GS) Grade Vet • Specialization' Location Seniority Rating Credit Ran k

7 APT-Level USDA Employees Protected by Veterans' Status Abernaz 14 M. V F MN 26 s +20 46 Morton 9 M,V F WI 24 3 +12 36 Angiulio 13 M. V s WI II 4 + 16 29 Ntaba' 13 M V F MN 2S 2 2S Quirk 9 M.V A MN 12 3 +12 24 Hackney 14 M,V s MN IS 2 IS Murchlsan 7 M,V F W I 7 2 7

I 9 APT-Level USDA Employees Likely lo Survil-e the RIF Two Bear' 13 M F WI 21 4 + 16 37 Zerbe II M F MN 18 4 +16 34 Madison 9 M F WI II 3 +12 33 llaberler 9 F s MN 21 3 +12 33 Phalt z II M A MN 20 3 +12 32

Houlihan II M F MN 19 3 +12 31 Eagle' 12 F s WI 10 s + 20 30 Pink 9 F F MN 14 4 + 16 30

Satter II M A WI 8 s + 20 28 Soren son II M A MN 14 3 +12 26

Jones. F 12 M A MN 13 3 + 12 2S Farnsworth 12 M F WI 9 4 +16 2S

Lob lick 10 F A WI 7 4 + 16 23

Jones, B 10 M F MN 21 2 2 1

West 13 M A W I 2 1 2 2 1

Beckel 9 M F MN 9 3 + 12 21

Boo 9 F A MN 8 3 +12 20

Dernbach 14 F F WI 18 2 18

Praski 9 r s MN 6 3 + 12 18

I J Vulncrnblc to Layoff Because of Low Retention-Register Rank

II~J2bYm' 9 F s W I 4 + 16 17 l.2hJlliul 9 F s W I 3 3 + 12 I S ~· II F A MN 3 3 + 12 IS

~· II M A WI 3 3 + 12 IS

~iD:i~ll~:i 9 F s MN 3 3 +12 I S Ed~l~v~l:i:i 10 F s WI 2 3 +12 14 ~· 12 M F WI II 2 I I

~· II F s WI 10 2 10 S!Y[div~n 9 F A WI 8 2 8

Srn~lbm' II i\1 s MN 7 2 7 Ss::bm~i[~[ 9 F A WI 6 2 6

M.i!Dk¥' 10 M s W I 3 2 3 ~ 9 F F MN 2 2 2

• V - veterans· prcferencec

' F - field-worker; S - social worker; A - administrative staffer.

'Native Americ;Jn or other minonty affiliation.

56 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

"I've listed our seven protected vets at the top," Drnda said. "The remaining thirty-two are listed in descending order on th e retention register, assuming that we lump everyone into a single competitive level."

Retention register? Competitive level? To Mary's ears this was more civil service jargon.

Anton Kurvaszy called for a pause to give his new assistant a brief explanation (see Box 2.2). "A retention register," he told Mary, "is the listing of people subject to a RIF, gradua ted according to their level of protection, from the highest-ranked individ- uals in a 'compet itive level' to the lowest. The competitive level is the listing of all those workers who have roughl y substitutable skills. By definition, anyone in a com- petitive level shou ld be able to make a transition into anyone else's job within that level. Anyone can bump a worker in the same competitive level if that worker has a lower retenti on rank." Kurvaszy pointed to the bottom of Drnda's worksheet: "The last thirteen names, the underlined ones, have no one beneath them to bump. They're the thirteen w ho will have to go."

" How do you establish the retention ranks?" Drnda answered Mary. "Civil service rules award a tenured worker-that is,

anyone who has successfu lly completed an initial probationary period in career gov- ernmen t employment- I point for each year of service. Then you add a credit based on the worker's average job performance over recent rating periods. The retention rank is the seniority score plus the performance credit."

After a silent minute or two, while everyone tried to take in the codes and num- be rs on Drnda's worksheet, Dagmar Blaine addressed Drnda: "Okay, Roman. Is this meeting for real, or just a charade? Have you already made your decision about who's going to get RIFfed, and thi s coffee-klatsch is rea ll y just a sociable way to tell us which of our constituents are going to lose their jobs?" Blai ne pointed at the underlined names on Drnda's worksheet: "Poor Hepburn, and johnson, and the others on you r li st of the luckless . "

"No, Dagmar. No decisions have been made. I want input from all of you. If any of you can come up with a better way to run this RIF, I'd like to know it. Alii ask is, you don't divulge this tentative information, which is just a straw man for planning pur- poses, to anyone bu t your own principals." In other words, Dagmar Blaine could talk the entire problem over with Congresswoman Moe; Chris Clairy could talk with Sen- ator Loffel; and Guy Strumi could confer with Walt March. But none of the attendees at the Golden Gopher coffee-klatsch was to leak names of probable layoff candidates to the press, or even to tell the vulnerable employees about their place on Drnda's list.

Chris Clairy spoke up. "I can give you one bit of input right now." He stabbed a finger toward the bottom ca tegory on Drnda's list: "The way you have it set up, Roman, eight or nine of the people to be RIFfed would be from the Wisconsin side, ju st because they're junior. Look at the list. Most of those are women or Native Amer- icans, or they have excellent performance records-a lot better than the records of some of the more-senior people, w ho' ll use pure longevity to bump better workers."

"I don't have it ·set up,' Chris," Ornda countered, his voice betraying some testi- ness. "There 's nothing definite yet-nothing, of course, except (if our advance word is right) that thirteen people wi ll have to go. If you want to change my list, which is only a draft, tell me how. "

Public Personnel Administration 57

BOX 2 .2 ------------•---•---•~

A Primer on Federa l RI Ffi ng Procedures

At all levels of government, RIFfing procedures, as they are called, are elaborately lim- ited by personnel laws. They are also controlled by civil service regulations, which have the force of law, and often by the terms of contracts negotiated with government employees' unions. These too are lega lly binding.

Title V, Chapter I, Code of Federal Regulations requires that "competitive areas"- areas within which federal employees will compete for the jobs that remain after a RIF-be designated within all federal agencies and departments. Each competitive area (I) must embrace a definable geographic region and (2) must have a reasonable organizational rationale. Two units from different departments of government-say from the Agriculture Department and from Health and Human Services-can't share a competitive area even if they have offices in the same region or, for that matter, in the same building. A competitive area also must encompass a single "local commut- ing area." According to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) RIFfing handbook:

A Local Commuting Area is a geographic area that usually includes any popu- lation center and the surrounding communities in which people live and rea- sonably travel back and forth to work.

A RIF administrator is required to study the position descriptions of every employee within each competitive area and, strictly on the basis of these descriptions, must group interchangeable positions into competitive levels. Another pertinent pro- v ision from the OPM handbook reads:

The competitive level is based on each employee's position description, not on the employee's personal qualifications.

Two positions that are similar (e.g., same grade, series, work schedule, etc.), but are not identical , may be placed in the same competitive level if the position descriptions show that each emp loyee wou ld need less th an 90 days to perform the key tasks of the other position.

(You should note that Drnda, when developing his draft retentio n register, trea ted every worker on the list-whether an F. an A, or an S-as i nterchangeable with every other one. Wa s that a defensible judgment? Or might the difficulty of an F worker's transition to an A or an S worker's duties subject a RIF that Ornda runs under that arrangement to challenge in court, based on the charge that it violated the rule of interchangeable positions?)

Once competitive levels have been defined, the administ rator prepares forma l retention registers by rank-ordering i ndividuals within each level using a format minutely prescribed in 5 CFR I, subpart E, sections 35 I .501-35 1.506. The handbook is explicit: "Tenure is the most important factor [when determining an individual's rank order for a layoff] while performance is the least important factor." Think that one over a while!

58 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

All workers in the same tenure bracket are grouped together; in this phase of the RIFfing process, career workers compete against career workers, political appointees compete against other po litica l appointees, probationary workers (who haven't yet gained civil service tenure) compete against their counterparts, and so forth. Next, with in each tenure group, veterans are subgrouped for preferential treatment. Under most conditions, a veteran can bump a nonveteran , even if the latter has more expe- rience and higher performance ratings. Third, individuals in each subgroup are listed in order of seniority. Finally, excellence in performance is reflected by adding a seniority- equivalent number to certain individuals ' rankings-an additional twenty years' credit for workers who averaged the highest performance rankings in recent job evalua tions (performa nce ra ting of 5), sixteen years for a 4, and twelve years for a 3.

Broadly, bumping provisions permit a worker who is subject to layoff to displace a lower-ranking employee on the retention register, provided that the displacement occurs ( 1) w ithin the sa me competi tive level; (2) within a specified number of civil ser- vice grade levels, norma lly three-meaning. for example, that a GS-13 usuall y may not bump a GS-5; (3) into a job for which the bump ing employee can be fully qualified after no more than ninety days of training (the aforementioned interchangeability requirement); and (4) into a pos ition that is not covered by a special exception. Sec- tio n 351.607 of the federal RIFfi ng regulations specifics the most important exception:

An agency may make exception to the order of release ... when needed to retain an employee on duties that cannot be taken over wi thin 90 days and with- out undue interruption to the activity by an employee with higher retent ion standing.

(Again, Drnda has bent the ru les-in this case, by stretchi ng the competitive level to cove r all employees between GS-9 and GS-14 , inclusive, instead of confining the level to workers within three civil service grades of one another. Here too, as with Drnda's parameter change concerning interchangeable positions, it's the reasonableness of Drnda's judgment that could become a crucial issue if a cha llenger were to contest hi s RIFfing procedure. What do you t hink?)

••• "Why not make two competitive levels?" Clairy asked. "Use one level for every-

one on the Wisconsin side, and the other for everyone in Minnesota. That way senior ~linnesotans could bump junior ones in Minnesota, but they couldn 't bust out junior people on the Wisconsin side. We'd end up with roughly eq ual sharing of the layoffs by people from both states. That's fair."

Drnda was about to answer Clairy, but he was interrupted by Anton Kurvaszy: " Roman , look at the way your li st ends up RIFfing not only disproportionate numbers on the Wisconsin side but also people on the welfare and service ends of the work-the very ones we need most as long as the St. Croix continues on the economic downside."

It was true. In general, the technica l advisers and administrators of traditional agricu lture programs-the officia ls, for example, who evaluate local farmers' applica- tions for crop subsidies-had sen iority over ad m inistrators and caseworkers in the welfare areas. On average, workers with Fs on Drnda 's list had been in the USDA har-

Public Personn el Administration 59

ness longer than those hired to deal with the recent problem s of social and economic distress in th e area. The way Drnda had approached t he ranking, the variations in the patte rns of longevity on the job co uldn 't help but cau se di sproportionate hurt to social workers-those coded S on Ornda's list.

" I don't think," Kurvaszy added, "you intended 'Last hired, first fired ' to be your rule of se lection, Roman."

Drnda thought for a seco nd and then acknowledged the va lidity of Kurvaszy's observatio n. "You 're right. Eve n though the regu lations favor se niority, th ey don 't req ui re us to put our brain s entirely in cold storage! We can 't do this RIF thing in a vacuu m. " Th e nature o f USDA w ork in the St . Croix w as changing. Arguably, the depart ment didn 't need all t hose agricultural technician s any more. Drnda's reten tion register would guarantee co ntinu ed employmen t fo r people with the traditional USDA skills, even th ough th ey weren ' t needed as much in th e region as they had been in the old days. Drnda's listi ng would also result in the RIFfing of workers with expertise and (presumably) interest in socially oriented jobs.

"The number of social service jobs goes up every year," Drnda admitted. He wondered out loud if it w ou ld reall y be so easy for senior technicians-agronomists, crop specia lists, soil experts, and so forth -to take over the work of t he more-juni or socia l service p rofessionals w hom , under Drnda's scheme, th e technicians might b ump.

Mary Martengrove asked: "Since t he poi nt see ms to be, how to prevent the ser- vice profess iona ls w ho do more and more of the work of the depa rtm ent from being bu mped by workers w ith more se niority b ut less critical skill s, w hy not put th e Fs, As, and Ss in se para te competiti ve levels?"

Dagmar Blaine didn 't see m to get Mary 's drift. Drn da, sensing her pu zz lement, explai ned: "The more co mpetit ive levels we crea te, the few er individuals w ho can b ump others, sin ce each on e is competing w ithin a sma ll er group. That gives us bet- ter con trol over the outcom e. At th e extre me, if you could put every worker in hi s or her own competitive level , yo u co uld pretty much choose w hom to lay off by decla r- ing ce rta i n competitive leve ls super flu ous. By d efin iti on, a re leased individual could - n 't bump a worker lowe r down in the register becau se there wouldn 't be anyone else in that spec ific individu al 's category to bump! ''

Blaine, ca tching the poi n t, nodded. Nevertheless, someth ing in Drnda's voice co nveyed that he would be leery of a retention register that contain ed too many co m- petitive levels.

The six talked a bit longe r, and then Drnda adjourn ed the meeting. " Look it over, " he sa id in closing. ''I'll be fooling wi th th is retention register all day to morrow. Give me a ca ll if yo u have fu rther reactions, or if you ca n th ink of a better way to approach all th is."

• • • • • The next day, Mary asked Kurvaszy: " Wha t kind of manager wa nts to eliminate

all judgment and just go by the numbers-wh ich seems to mean mostly se niority?" Mary con fessed th at she didn 't understand why Drnda seemed w illing to let abstract ru les, abstractly applied, decide w hich wo rkers would remain to staff the USDA orga- ni zatio n in th e St. Croix region.

60 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

"Why," Mary asked, "wouldn't the guy running the RIF identify the best per- formers on a staff? Then the worst ones? And then design the retention register so that, when the required number of people are laid off and all bumping rights have been exercised, the best have been protected, and the duds are the ones elimi nated? Why not use a little discrimination when defining interchangeable positions and com- petitive levels?"

Kurvaszy could think of several reasons why Mary's approach might be prob- lematical, and his almost-perceptible wincing at the word discrimination suggested what one of them might be.

"Some managers do let the dice fall just that way, going strictly by the numbers," Kurvaszy acknowledged. "Any other way, any attempt to 'game' the process, and a manager 's open to appeals through the higher echelons in the department, through the civil service system appeals process-that's run by OPM itself-and, of course, through the courts."

Kurvaszy thought a moment before contin uing. "The whole point of all those RIFfing rules is to prevent the person who runs the operation from exercising personal control-and to prevent the abuse tha t can go with so much control. " The RIFfing pro- cedure, Kurvaszy added-and especially the requirement to collect slots into compet- itive levels based strictly on job descriptions, not on the performance records of the people filling existing positions-had been designed to keep an administrator from rigging a RIF to favor particular individuals.

"Besides," Kurvaszy added, " the public employees' unions watch the RIFfing process closely. So, of course, do the affected workers-and so do their lawyers, if it comes to that. Any listing of retention entitlements has to comply with the rules. Managers aren't supposed to gimmick-up a RIF for the purpose of beating the ten- ure protections of the more-sen ior workers. There have to be reasonable justifica- tions for any departures from the RIFfing rules, read in the most straightforward way. If a RIF manager bends th e rules too far, he or she will ju st land the department in court.

Anton shrugged philosophically. "just going by the numbers may not be the best way to protect the best workers, but it sti ll may be best from the bureaucratic stand- point. Like it or not, it's not necessarily unreasonable for a RIF manager to take the line of least resistance. I agree with you, " Kurvaszy admitted, "that's what Roman seems to be doing here. ju st line 'e m up using the simplest imaginable ranking pro- cedure-that 's what Roman's done; then shoot as many hostages as the boss orders, making no judgments about whom should be spa red. So-as Dagmar Blaine pointed out-poor Hepburn and Johnson and the others among the unprotected thirteen lose out." He added that, if Mary cou ld devise a better way, Drnda -whose life had been devoted to the cause of American agriculture and those who worked in it-would su rel y be happy to hear about it.

Later, at her desk, Mary picked up from Drnda's question about a three-way breakout of compet itive levels. Table 2.2 shows the alternative retention register that Mary, after some playing with the names and numbers, came up with.

"What do you think?" she asked Kurvaszy. Anton looked at the names Mary had underlined on her suggested alternative

li sting. "Yo u want to RIF deeply into the F category .... "

Public Per sonnel Administration 61

Table 2.2 Mary Martengrove's A lternative Reten t io n Regi ster Based on Three Compe titive Levels (F/S/A)

Genera l Schedule M/ F Job Average Job Performance Regis ter

(GS) Grade Vet• Specialization' Location Seniority Rating Credit Rank

APT Compelitive Level I: Interchangeable F Skills Abernaz 14 M,V F MN 26 s + 20 46 Morton 9 M,V F WI 24 3 + 12 36 Ntaba' 13 M V F MN 2S 2 2S Murchisan 7 M,V F WI 7 2 7 1\vo Bear' 13 M F WI 21 4 +16 37 Zerbe I I M F MN 18 4 +16 34 Madison 9 M F WI I I 3 +12 33 Houlihan II M F MN 19 3 + 12 3 1 Pink 9 F F MN 14 4 +16 30 Farn:iWQ[tb 12 M F WI 9 4 +16 2S

~ 10 M F MN 2 1 2 21 Beckel 9 M F MN 9 3 +12 21

Q~rnbill:b 14 F F WI 18 2 18

~· 12 M F WI II 2 II ~ 9 F F MN 2 2 2

APT Competitive Level 2: Interchangeable S Skills Angiulio 13 M,V s WI II 4 +16 29 Hackney 14 M, V s MN IS 2 IS Haberler 9 F s MN 21 3 + 12 33 Eagle' 12 F s WI 10 s +20 30 Praski 9 F s MN 6 3 + 12 18 Hepburn' 9 F s WI I 4 +16 17 Johnson 9 F s WI 3 3 + 12 IS Kin sallas 9 F s MN 3 3 + 12 IS Edelweiss 10 F s WI 2 3 +12 14 QQiWl' I I F s WI 10 2 10 Smatb~:r~· I I M s MN 7 2 7 M.9.D.ley' 10 M s WI 3 2 3 APT Competitive Level 3: Interchangeable A Skills Quirk 9 M,V A MN 12 3 + 12 24 Pha lt z I I M A MN 20 3 + 12 32 Satter I I M A WI 8 s + 20 28 Sorenson I I M A MN 14 3 + 12 26

Jones, F 12 M A MN 13 3 +12 2S Lob lick 10 F A WI 7 4 + 16 23 West 13 M A WI 21 2 2 1

Boo 9 F A MN 8 3 +12 20 Laurie' I I F A MN 3 3 +12 IS

~· II M A WI 3 3 +12 IS Sll.m;!i~~D 9 F A WI 8 2 8

S~:bm~:i~r 9 F A WI 6 2 6

• V - velcrans· preference.

' F - field-worker; S - social worker; A - admlnl slralive sl affer.

'Nalive American or olhcr mlnorily afflllalion.

62 Public Administration : The Profession and the Practice

"Maybe my exact number's off," Mary sa id, "but it seems reasonable to con- centrate the layoffs w here the demand for skilled workers is thinnest, am ong the field technicians, the Fs."

Kurvaszy nodded. "Under yo ur RIF plan, poor Pink here gets the ax, even though she's been a good, loyal DA type for more than a dozen years and ha s a fine work record, ... and ha s a retention register total of 30. Wh ile"-Anton scanned Mary's worksheet, looking for a compari son case to make his point-"while Lisa Hep- burn, a brand-new worker at the same grade as Pink, but with a register total bare ly more than half of Pink's, keeps her job ju st because it carries a ·social w ork' code!"

• • • • • As bargaining agent for most of the organ ized federa l workers in the four-county

area, "White-Collar Walt" March was a figure of importance across upper Minnesota and Wisconsin. He listened as Guy Strumi described Drnda's tentative retention reg- ister. Guy went on to fi ll March in on the alternative approach that Anton Kurvaszy and Kurvaszy's new assistant, Mary Martengrove, had suggested. Strumi referred to the plans, respectively, as th e "inclusive" retention register (Table 2.1) and the "dis- criminating" three- level register (Table 2.2).

"Under Drnda's inclusive plan," Strum i sum mari zed, "a ll APTs in the area wou ld be thrown into a single competiti ve leve l. Veterans wou ld be protected. Bumping wou ld proceed until only thirteen workers remain who have no one below them to dis- place. Under Mary Martengrove's alternative, the retention registers would be drawn up in a way that discriminates among the three kinds of wo rkers: field-workers, social workers, and straight admi ni strators. In other words, the Fs, Ss, and As would have separate registers, preventing cross-b umping. The justification suggested by Kurvaszy and Martengrove a t the Golden Gopher meet ing had bee n that a higher percentage of Fs could be let go under the discriminating approach than under the inclusive plan. Anton and Mary had reasoned that fieldwork-that is, providing extension services to working farmers-seemed al most superfluous under curren t conditions. As Kurvaszy had pu t it, the shrinkage in the farm population had made w hat many of the Fs used to do alm ost irrelevant, w hi le hard times were making the work of the Ss-food stamps, WIC outreach-more vital than ever before.

March frowned . Strumi thought he knew w hat was on March's mind. Among the area's USDA workers, as among federal employees generally, actual card-carrying, dues-paying membership in unions had long been patchy and irregular. It happened that the more-senior USDA workers in the St. Croix area-Drnda's Fs-constituted the co re orga n ized group, whi le most Ss had decided no t to join the union. The As were evenly split; SO percent were AFGE members, SO percent were not. Walt March under- stood the mechanisms (a nd all the tricks) of a RIF, and he could see what might be in store for his members, depending on the RIFfing approach that Drnda finally used. Under th e inclusive approach, March 's members' jobs would mostly be protected- although that wou ldn't have been any part of Drnda's reason for going with Table 2.1. By contrast, the discriminating approach would end u p RIFfing Fs and effectively favoring th e nonunionized Ss.

March pondered the option s. He suspec ted th at Drnda would p refer the dis- cri minating approach after he had thought through all the twists, since-as Kurvaszy

Public Personnel Administration 63

and Martengrove had argued-it would leave the department with a workforce better suited to the current USDA mission in the region. March knew Roman Drnda well. He told Strumi that Drnda wouldn't be prejudiced against a better way of running the RIF just because someone else had suggested it. Drnda wasn't afflicted by th e "not invented here " syndrome.

" In other words," Guy responded, "you think Roman will scrap his own inclu- sive retention register and adopt th e more discriminating approach?"

March considered another moment. "That's what I'd kind of expect," he said tentatively.

What strategy should March play in response? Both he and Strumi knew that the bottom line for a union negotiator in the private sector is the threat of a strike. But things arc different in federal government collective bargaining. The ultimate sanc- tion against management-in this case, against Roman Drnda and Drnda's boss, Sec- retary Nyby-is the threat of litigation. A willingness to litigate shows gumption on the union leader's part, demonstrates the solidarity of the membership, and warns management not lightly to mess with workers' rights.

And how did all that apply to the coming RIF of the St. Croix USDA workers? March said: "My thinking now, off the top of my head, is this: On the merits, the

inclusive approach would obviously be better from our standpoint than the discrimi- nating plan wou ld be. Furthermore, we'd probably lose if we sued to keep Drnda from RIFfing on the basis of the discriminating, three-level plan."

March thought for a second, then said: "But win or lose, I think it might be time to litigate on this RIF-tie ·em up in court, let everyone know we don't mean to go quietly while they cut back all over the federal government. Sue the bastards!- whether Drnda uses the inclu sive or the discriminating plan."

Strumi liked to hear March talk union tactics. The union had to pick a fight every now and then. Cutbacks were never to be conceded-even when a leader, such as March, knew in his heart of h earts that some personnel trimming has become unavoid<lble. It was the threat of lega l ha ss les that kept cab inet officers such as Nyby, and their henchmen (such as Drnda), honest.

" I don't mind telling you ," March added, "considered strictly as a legal strategy and for political effect, I'd rather sue if Drnda goes with the inclusive plan than with the discriminating one." After all , the aim of a suit would be to make a gesture. All other things being equa l, March obviously would prefer to litigate in a case that the union actually had a chance to win. Legally, a stronger case could sure ly be made against the inclusive plan than against the discriminating, three-level approach. A RIFfing plan, if litigated, would have to pass what lawyers call "the test of reason- ableness," and a judge might well find the discriminating approach to be the more reasonable one because it would permit patterns of layoff (of Fs) and retentions (of

In contrast with the pr<Jctice in some municipa l and state public-sector unions, where "job actions" and strikes have become relatively common. federal unions rarely call strikes or even quietly approv~ -wildcat" w<Jikouts. Federal civil servants' salaries are set by Congress rather than in collective b<~rgalning. (Sec the discussion in Box 2.1 .) Part of the reason why strikes arc rarely used in federal labor disputes is that they arc unlikely to be effective means of bringing pressure to bear in Congress. Indeed. striking mily boomerang by offending public opinion. Legislative lobbying and providing campaign support to congressional candi- dates have proved over the years to be more successful union tactics.

64 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

Ss) in better alignment wi th projected USDA workloads. In other words, the union faced a grea ter risk of losing a case brought to block implementation of the discrimi- nating retention register even though implementation of the inclu sive register wou ld be less harmful to the immediate interests of March's union members.

Strumi had to agree. There might be just enough ru le bending in the inclusive approach for a federal judge to void a RIF run on the basis of Drnda's original reten- tion register. (See, for example, the doubts about Drnda's methods mentioned in Box 2.2 .) One problem from March 's viewpoint was that the blanket threat of a lega l chal- lenge might give Drnda the nudge to scrap Table 2.1 and draw up retention registers in closer conformity with the spirit of civil service rules and current USDA personnel needs in th e four-cou nty region . On the other hand, for any number of reasons, Drnda could decide to proceed with his original , inclusive retention regi ster, especially if he didn't think that a RIF based on Table 2. 1 would face a challenge in court. Table 2.1 wou ld certa i nly be simpler to administer than Table 2.2 . That might be grounds enough for Drnda to favo r it if he thought he wouldn't have to worry about defending the inclusive approach before a federal judge.

Strumi said: "You th ink Drnda will assume he has an open ticket to bend the RIFfing rules unless he suspects the u nion wi ll take him to court."

March nodded, adding: "That's one reason why we probably wil/ take him to court, no matter which approach he takes. The worst strategy-at lea st from the union's standpoint-would be if Drnda goes with the discriminating plan and we just si t by without acting. That would give Drnda a free ride. He'd go ahead and RIF peo- ple w ho are counting on the union to protect them. Next worse would be for us to go for an injunction against the discriminating plan, sin ce we'd be more likely to lose. Still in all, if we sue-even if we lose-we'll salvage credibility, both with the USDA muckety-mucks and w ith our own members. That's probably better than doing nothing."

It was more than a bit confusing. Strumi wanted to be sure he understood March's rather twisty- turny reasoning: " I hear you saying that you'd prefer 'going quietly'-not litigating-under the inclusive plan rather than litigating under the dis- criminating plan ."

"That's right," March replied, "but we'd probably prefer suing even under the inclusive plan rather than accepting the RIF quietly, even on the inclu sive plan. And we'd prefer going quietly under the discriminating plan least of all."

• • • • • Late in the afternoon of the day after the Golden Gopher meeting, Roman Drnda

received the call that he had half expected to get, given the evident dissatisfaction of Chris Cla iry over Drnda's initial plan for the RIF. After some time Drnda recradled the phone, his head shaking and ears burning. Mary Martengrove was visiting in Drnda's office at the time. Kurva szy-though somewhat skeptical of Mary's plan-had told her to show the three-way breakout to Drdna as a possible alternative.

The call had been from Clairy's boss, Senator Ben Loffel. "Chri s Clairy really got the senator's dander up over the 'unfairness ' of my RIF plan, " Drnda explained to Mary.

Public Personnel Administration 65

Mary's alma mater, " U-W is at Eau Clai re," was on the edge of Ben Loffel's state senatoria l district. Mary knew of Loffel's long hi sto ry of su pport for affirmative action programs. Hi s efforts had helped dozens of kids like herself get through college and into good jobs. Mary had grown up in Min nesota, but had she been a Wisconsin native, she might well have gone to Eau Cla ire u nder one of the in-state scholarship programs that Senator Loffel had fought through Wisconsin's state legislature. Fur- thermore, Loffel's aides-including Chris Clairy-had always tried to help the benefi- ciaries of the senator's educational programs when it came time to move on into entry-level government jobs. A high percentage of these Loffel proteges were (like Mary) women, Native Americans, or both. Und er Drnda's tentative RIFfing plan, a dis- proportionate number of Loffel's proteges-Wisconsin-based jobholders-would be bumped out of work.

Drnda told Mary: "What Ben wants is exactly what Clairy suggested at the Golden Gopher meeting: Protect workers in each state separately. Since the seniority's mostly in the Fs, and it just happens that the Fs are mostly in Minnesota, the best way to protect junior Wisconsi n people is by giving them their own competitive level so Minnesotans can't bump 'em."

"Here," Drnda said, w heeling his swivel chair over to the fax machine and draw- ing a sheet from its output tray. "Here's Loffel's idea of a •fair' retention register" (see Table 2.3).

• • • • • By coincidence "the sisters," as they ca lled themselves, met in the same booth

at the Golden Gopher Grill where Drnda, Kurvaszy, and the others had discussed the impending RIF a few days earlier. Lief Pink had been in the Larch City Big Sister pro- gram w hen she was in high school, w ith Bobbie Boo as her charge. Bobbie became Li sa Hepburn's big sister a few years later. The three remained close despite the dif- ferences in their ages. When Lisa ca me back home for visits from her Ag Department position across the bridge in W isconsin, the sisters often got together for coffee and gossip. All three held USDA jobs; all three knew of the impending RIF; and all three knew that th eir names were on a retention register somewhere.

Lief Pink was not onl y the oldest but also the most knowledgeable about the ways of the civil service. She didn't like one bit w hat she surmised must be going on over at Roman Drnda's office. Lief-a federally funded extension agent specializing in dairy, sheep, and goat herd management-didn't care for the thought that Drnda had probably red uced her fo urteen years of exemplary service to a single statistic, her standing on an impersonal retention register.

"We're three,~ Lief said to Bobbie and Lisa, "and on the probabilities alone, that means one of us will go." Which one? Lief knew that it wou ld depend pretty much on the way Roman Drnda drew the retention registers. To her, that came close to saying that the decision about their jobs would be arbitrary.

" I need the job," Li sa Hepburn had repeated severa l times during their conver- sation. By dint of extrao rdin ary grit and sacrifice, Lisa had scraped her way to a two- year's associate degree in management science at a local community college, after which she won a perma nent job in the USDA. Lisa's family, trappers in the winter and

66 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

Table 2.3 Ben Loffel 's/Ch ri s Cla iry's Suggested Retention Register Based on Separate Sta te Competitive Levels

General Schedu le M/F Job Average Job Performance Register

(GS) Grade Vet• Specialization' Location Seniority Rating Credit Rank

Competitive Level M, confined to APTs working in Minnesota Abernaz 14 M,V F MN 26 5 + 20 46 Ntaba' 13 M V F MN 25 2 2S Quirk 9 M, V A MN 12 3 +12 24 Hackney 14 M,V s MN IS 2 IS Zerbe II M F MN 18 4 +16 34 Haberler 9 F s MN 21 3 +t2 33 Phaltz II M A MN 20 3 +12 32 Houlihan II M F MN 19 3 +12 31 Pink 9 F F MN 14 4 +16 30 Sorenson II M A MN 14 3 +12 26 Jones, F 12 M A MN 13 3 +12 2S Jones, B 10 M F MN 21 2 2 1 Beckel 9 M F MN 9 3 +12 2 1

J.lQ.Q 9 F A MN 8 3 +1 2 20 Praski 9 F s MN 6 3 +12 18 Lauric' II F A MN 3 3 +12 IS ISin~alla ~ 9 F s MN 3 3 +12 IS Smathers' II M s MN 7 2 7 ~ 9 F F MN 2 2 2

Competitive Level W. confined to APTs working in Wisconsin Morton 9 M,V F WI 24 3 + 12 36 Angiulio 13 M,V s WI II 4 +16 29 Murchisan 7 M, V F WI 7 2 7 Two Bear' 13 M F WI 21 4 +16 37 Madison 9 M F WI II 3 +12 33 Eagle' 12 F s WI 10 s + 20 30 Safter II ~I A WI 8 s + 20 28 Farnsworth 12 M F WI 9 4 +16 2S Loblick 10 F A WI 7 4 +16 23 West 13 M A WI 21 2 21 Dernbach 14 F F WI 18 2 18 Hepburn' 9 F s WI I 4 +16 17 Johnson 9 F s WI 3 3 +12 IS Charles' II M A WI 3 3 +12 IS Edelweis~ 10 F s WI 2 3 +12 14 Cloudie' 12 1\1 F WI II 2 II

Doggett' II F s WI 10 2 10 Sturdiven 9 F A WI 8 2 8 Schmcircr' 9 F A WI 6 2 6

Manley' 10 M s WI 3 2 3

• V- veterans' preference.

'F - field-worker; S - social worker; A - admlnistrJtivc sto1ffer.

'Native American or other minority affiliation.

Public Personnel Administration 67

on welfare the rest of the year, depended on her for financial support. She was the first woman from the band' to complete a degree; she was a role model for all the younger girls.

"You're pretty junior in rank, Lis'," Bobbie said, "and that makes you p retty bumpable, depending on how they draw the retention register." None of the three sis- ters uttered the thoughts they all had about "Lisa the 'twofer.'" As both a woman and a Native American, Lisa Hepburn counted for two credi ts in the affirmative action ledger that everyone thought existed in the locked drawer of a shadowy personnel manager somewhere in the civil service. Of course, any filling of affirmative action "quotas" was illegal , and USDA officials denied that personnel decisions were ever made on any bases other than seniority and merit. Nevertheless, most lower-level workers suspected that considerations of "political correctness" figured subtly in pro- cedures for appointment, advancement, and separation.

Over their second cups, Lief-a single mother w ho thought she needed the work every bit as much as Bobbie and Lisa did-explained the ins and outs of a RIF to the other two: what "competitive areas," "commut ing areas," "competitive levels," and the rest meant and how the system worked in practice.

Bobbie Boo worked out of the jackson Building. Her job was to assess local crop-farmers' acreage- limitation applications. With eight years of tenured service, Bobbie thought herself too far into a government career to consider a switch, and yet she recognized her vu lnerability to bumping from above. Furthe rmore, Bobbie recog- nized that her job skills would have relatively little carryover to nongovernment work if she were among the 1 in 3 who would bear the burden of the RIF and so would have to look for jobs outside the civil se rvice.

"You know Roman Drnda," Bobbie said to Lief. "Is he the kind who tries to think about us as persons. instead of just names on lists?"

• • • • • Across the alley from the Golden Gopher in his jackson Building office, Roman

Drnda sat, fee ling the pressure. His friend and boss Secretary Nyby himself had called from Washington to tell Drnda that he'd better get on with it. The RIF order was offi- cial. Nyby had prodded Drnda: ''If 'tis done, 'twere well it were done quickly."

Drnda looked again at the three drafts of retention registers. Indeed, he very much appreciated that the underlined names stood for rea l people, not for impersonal slots in a table of organization. Drnda's eyes flicked to the corner of his desk, where the RIFfing rules lay waiting for a final check over, lest his decision go too far afou l of any official requirement. Drnda knew that the boss was right: It was time to do what he had to do.

Bnmf: Members of the Ojibway Tribe-also called Chippcwas-arc organized mto subunits known as bands. Each band has a geographic base. Lisa Hepburn Clike 1\.lary M.:lrtengrovel belongs to the Thunder

BJy Band.

68 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

Questions for Discussion

The fo llowing queries might he lp you frame your thoughts and organize a discussion of the case.

l . Whats the story? Who must make what decisions, resolve what confltcts, take what actions? Bearing in mind that situational factors are all-important in case analysis, what circumstances of the action and conditions of the agents should be kept in mind when pondering the steps that the figures in the case should take?

2. How does the conflict discussed by Osborne and Gaebler-the conflict between organizational mission and organizational rules-present itself in this case? How should the changing pattern of demand for USDA services-a decreasing need for extension work, although technical assistance has traditionally been the focus of USDA employee skills-condition the way that Drnda manages the RIF? In what forms (if any) do the concerns we've tdenufied in relation to underdetermination and overdetermination enter into the case?

3. Which ways of dealing wi th conditions of underdetermination-restructuring, liti- gation, strategic interaction, and so forth-seem most likely to be helpful to the fig- ures in the case? Which of these terms best describes the situation in which Roman Drnda and Walt March find themselves? How should Drnda react when he gets wind of the strategy that March seems bent on using (namely, "go to court no mat- ter which RIFfing strategy Drnda uses")? What do you think of the arguments March gives Guy Strumt for adopting this highly combative strategy? Since "cir- cumstances make the case," what changes in the givens of the scenario might mod- ify your views regarding the courses of action that Drnda and March should take?

4. Our reading from Frank Thompson underscores the multiple criteria that charac- teristically apply to civil servtce personnel actions. Which of the following criteria should a supervisor like Roman Drnda seek primarily to satisfy in an era of cutback management: performance of the agency (the mission), scrupulous adherence to ch'il service rules, compassion for workers who suddenly become vulnerable to layoffs, or deference to persons (such as sponsors in Congress) whose support may be needed to sustain the agency over the long haul? Taking Drnda's situation as an instance of an overdetermined admmtstrath•e problem, what uses might he make of such techniques as priority setting, parameter changing, and policy adjusting?

5. In your opinion, whose retention register-Roman Dmdas (Table 2.1), Mary Manengroves (Table 2.2), or Senator Loffels (Table 2 .3)-can be supported \vith the most persuasive arguments? "Discuss and defend"; justify your selection.

6. Whats the appropriate way for Roman Dmda to think about the personal con- cerns of employees like "the sisters"? If you were running a RIF, would you try to keep the process impersonal and manage it by the numbers, or would you "put faces on the procedure" by trying to gain knowledge of individuals' specific situ- ations? What do you see as the main pros and cons of each approach?

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Public Pers onnel Adminis tra tion 69

FOR FURTHER READING ------••~•.-...•~

PPA is probably the s ubfie ld of pub lic admin istration that has been stud ied most inten- sively a nd over the longest stretch of years--going b ack at least to the period of the civil service re fo rme rs. Thus it isn 't s urprising that a well-developed literature exists. Som e of the best overv1ews o f the subject are

Dresang, Dennis L. , Public Personnel Ma nagement and Public Policy (New York: Lo ngman , 1991).

Nigro, E A., a nd L. G. Nigro, Th e New Public Personnel Admrn istration (Itasca IL: Peacoc k, 1991).

Sha fri tz, j ay, e t a l. , Personnel Ma nagement 111 Gove rnment, (New Yo rk: Marce l De kker, 1992).

Sylvia, Ro nald D., Public Personnel AdmmiSt ratwn (Belmont CA: Wadswonh, 1994).

Arguably the most inOuential inte rpretetive essay o n the subject o f PPA in recent years is

Mosher, Frederick C., Democracy and the Public Service (New Yo rk: Oxford, 1968); this is still probably the best, most readable introdu ctory essay on PPA.

The standard history o f o ur federal civil service (wh ich, unfonunately, breaks off in the late 1950s) is

Van Riper, Paul , A History of the United States Civ il Service (Evanston JL: Row, Peter- son , 1958).

Van Ripe rs book might be cons ulted in conj unc tio n with the fo llowing study, which is panic u larly helpfu l on the id eologica l a nd moral motivations of the civi l service reform e rs:

Ne lson , William , Th e Roots of American Bureaucracy (Cambridge MA: llarvard U. Press, 1982).

The best recent books on the high e r civil service an d political-appointee ranks are

H eclo, Hugh , A Government of Strangers: Executi ve Politics in Washi ngton (Wash- ington: Brookings Institution , 1977).

Light , Paul, Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Account- ability (Washington : Brookings Institution , 1995).

The two standard wo rks on the representativeness of civil service systems in the United States are

Kingsley, j. Donald , Representative Bureaucracy (Yellow Spn ngs OH: Antioch U. Press, 1944).

Krislov, Sam, and David Rosenbloom, Representati ve Bureaucracy (New York: Praege r, 198 1).

70 Public Administration: The Profession and the Practice

Fin ally, excellent brief OYerview treatments of the ci\11 service systems and their con- temporal) problems by two of most knowledgeable schola rs writing in this subfield these days are

Ingraham, PatnCJa, and Da\'ld Rosenbloom, "The New Public Personnel and the New Public Service," 46 Publrc Adm!llrstmtron Review (March-Apn l 1989), 116.

Ingraham, Patricia, and Da,1d Rosenbloom, "Poli ucal Foundations of the Ameri- can Federal Serv1ce: Rebuilding a Crumbling Base," 50 Public Administration Revle\\ (March- April l990), 210.