A New Deal for Public Employees
In his State of the City address earlier this month, Denver Mayor Wellington Webb advocated measures to increase the quality and efficiency of city services. In the very next paragraph, he supported putting collective bargaining for non-uniformed city employees on the ballot.
The right says these goals are incompatible - if government's customers and taxpayers are to be served, managers must be able to “crack the whip” on public employees. Collective bargaining will only get in the way.
Many liberals and the labor movement agree the goals are incompatible, but for the opposite reasons. They conclude that the employee rights are in direct conflict with any proposals that make government work better and cost less. In their minds, any increase in service quality and cost-effectiveness benefiting taxpayers must automatically be at the expense of workers.
Both sides could not be more wrong. The right fails to realize the lessons of the private sector - no company has successfully reinvented itself without the involvement and cooperation of front-line workers. The left wrongly thinks that they can continue to ask for more money in face of unprecedented levels of taxpayer dissatisfaction with government.
Webb, city council and the yet-to-be-born public employee union should make a compact with citizens. In exchange for collective bargaining rights, they should implement measures that mirror the mayor's successful restructuring of Denver's Health and Hospitals department.
Early on, the Webb administration recognized that the competitiveness of the health care marketplace had dramatically intensified. The mayor told Denver Health employees that survival required more flexible personnel, procurement and budgeting systems. Otherwise, as the Denver Post quoted him in 1995, “If we don't change to meet the conditions of today, it won't be your job because there will be no Health and Hospitals.”
While the threats facing Health and Hospitals may have been more apparent, the long-term challenge facing other city functions - like trash collection, street-paving and park maintenance - is just as real. To get voter approval for collective bargaining and new taxes for the infrastructure (i.e., a new jail), the public must first be convinced that they are getting a good bang for their tax buck.
As in the case of Health and Hospitals, competition must be embraced as an important tool in improving the delivery of services. Denver should heed the experience of Phoenix, where private sector firms, city departments and public employee unions get opportunities to bid on work.
Competition in trash collection services radically reinvented Phoenix's Public Works Department. Drivers redesigned routes and work schedules, quality circle teams were created and awards were given to the best employees. The department implemented a suggestion program that gave workers 10 percent of the savings generated by their recommendations.
Over a decade, the Phoenix city auditor estimates that competition has saved $20 million, measured by the difference between the bids the city accepted and the next lowest bid. However, since competition forced all bid levels down, this is but a small fraction of the savings.
In Denver, competition combined with collective bargaining would ensure that the savings come from new innovations, not simply from cutting jobs or lowering wage/benefit packages. The city might require bid-winning companies to hire displaced employees and to recognize the public employee union as the workers’ legitimate bargaining agent.
Those employees, who want to stay with the city, could be transferred to other jobs. Although it may not be the position they currently hold, workers can be guaranteed a job, especially when considering attrition rates.
To meet the competition, city employees will be demanding dramatic reform of the personnel, procurement and budgeting systems. Top-down, mandated changes will not be necessary.
The conservative belief that the private sector should always do the job is just as wrong-headed as the liberal belief that government should do it all. The important distinction is not public versus private or union versus no union, but monopoly versus competition.
Changing these misguided beliefs would do Denver city employees and taxpayers a lot of good.
Jim Gibson is president of the Colorado Democratic Leadership Council, a think tank that advocates new public policy ideas and the Democratic Party's historic commitment to economic growth, personal responsibility, community, individual liberty and equal opportunity.