|
Governors
vs the Unions
Unions aren’t the
only villains
By Bob Rhoades
It was all over the news this week, teachers and public employees
protesting in Ohio and Wisconsin. Every once in a while this
thing raises its ugly head. This time it’s right after a new
governor has taken office. As the State of Ohio goes, new
governors have to mess with stuff for about six months and then after
they’ve got new furniture and hired a bunch of people who don’t know
what they’re doing to be the boss of people who, for the most part, do
know what they’re doing, they settle in. Mr. Kasich as decided to
pick on public employees as the source of all evil having to do with
government’s shortcomings in the money world.
It’s usually a good idea to clean up your own closet before attacking
someone else. In the past 15 or so years, a number of public
officials, the latest Marc Dann, screwed up big time. Every time
that happened, some rocket scientist made all state employees take
ethics training. Realize how many people that involved in 88
counties and how much money it cost the citizens of Ohio in lost time.
It might be a better idea to train politicians in ethics before they
run for office.
If Mr. Kasich wants to see what the real problem is at the State level,
begin at the top of each agency. These bureaucracies have been
built by the state and the unions together. There are a lot of
good people working in each one of them. There are some very
incompetent people also working in all of them, most at the supervisory
level. This doesn’t say that many of them aren’t good
people. Their incompetence comes from being hired to do a job
they aren’t qualified to do. How can that be? It’s very
easy; it’s called the Department of Administrative Services (DAS).
Besides being the central purchasing agency for the state, they also
are the central everything else. One of the things that they do
is decide who is suited for what job in which agency based on how many
boxes they complete on a form, which is based on how many things they
matched up on their application and resume. They certify some
folks and send the hiring agency the list. It then becomes a
process of picking the least of 10 evils, not the best qualified in
many cases.
They get hired in most cases because the agency is in such dire need of
a warm body, they let the employees train their supervisor or point
them in the wrong direction as much as possible. This became
rampant after 9/11 because new jobs had to be created quickly and there
were no job descriptions developed so they took old ones and tried to
make them work. That’ll work! In one case a woman was hired in
our agency to be a supervisor dealing with biologic terrorism,
emergency response and development of training and exercises. She
had a BA in psychology and a Masters in Social Sciences. Do you
feel safe?
In other cases, especially close to elections, some agencies if not all
become dumping grounds for political hacks that will get whacked if
they stay in their current position under a different party. This
causes the agency to absorb a person who isn’t qualified to do much of
anything into a position, usually supervisory, and hope for the
best.
Where do the unions fit in to all of this? Union people can
usually get promoted to a nonunion position internally if they are
qualified. Many people choose not to because of the incompetence
in higher places and giving up the protection of the union.
That’s pretty sad but that is also what the “system” has created.
Unionization of state jobs was caused by poor working conditions, low
wages and other things. Unfortunately whatever happens on one
side of the fence affects what happens on the other side of the
fence. When you can’t make things work, write a stupid rule to
fix it. Competent people aren’t allowed to do their jobs because
their boss doesn’t understand what they are doing and kills good
processes in place of unworkable one.
When you bring people in to work in government agencies who have never
worked in government before, they bring baggage with them. This
comes in the form of old friends, bad habits, inability to understand
the agencies and a host of other things. In one instance, an
order came down from a new supervisor that all detective type people
must turn in their undercover license plates for state license
plates. That worked real well on stakeouts. In that case
the union filed a paper citing it was putting the agents in harm’s way
and got it rescinded. What a total waste of time and money.
Governor Strickland cited in his campaign that the Ohio Department of
Health had cut their phone bill in half by switching to Voice over
Internet protocol phones. This is true, this actually
happened. My question was if it worked at ODH, why didn’t the
rest of the agencies follow suit? Can you imagine how much money would
have been saved by now?
In my case, the agency I worked at decided to do away with our bureau
and it looked as nine of us would lose our jobs. We went to our
union rep and it was pretty much a useless waste of time. We
stood up and fought for our jobs. That process was also quite
hilarious. We ended up being transferred to another bureau.
There were other guys in that bureau doing what we did but at a
different pay grade. We all went over there, got pay raises and
continued to do what we were doing. What a well thought out
process. Not only was no money saved, more money was spent.
Wikipedia says this: Collective bargaining is a process of voluntary
negotiations between employers and trade unions aimed at reaching
agreements which regulate working conditions. Collective agreements
usually set out wage scales, working hours, training, health and
safety, overtime, grievance mechanisms and rights to participate in
workplace or company affairs.
Somewhere along the line some of this got lost in the shuffle. A
good presentation of what money was available wasn’t done.
Working conditions were compromised because of the protection given to
incompetents on both sides of the fence and the rest of the items fell
by the wayside or were compromised because of bad decisions on the part
of arbitrators and politicians. Union leaders found that to keep
their heads above water, they must also become politicians and here we
are 20 years later with a governor who is going to fix everything in
state government by smacking the unions around.
Probably not Mr. Governor!
|
|
|
|
