by terry rex spray

Real civil service reform

DOWNTOWN ORGANIZATIONS ARE arguing that San Francisco's civil service system is in need of reform. It's no surprise that the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association argues that the city should manage its personnel more like a business.

What is surprising is that organized labor agrees with some of what SPUR says.

At stake in this debate are fundamental changes in how the city compensates recruits and retains and manages the thousands of workers who provide essential public services to San Franciscans.

Both sides agree that San Francisco taxpayers deserve a sound and effective personnel system and that the current system could be more efficient. Unions support the fundamental principles of the merit system, or civil service, which provides each qualified applicant for a city job an equal shot at a position while ensuring an applicant is qualified for the position sought. In an ideal world, civil service guards against patronage, cronyism, and other unfair hiring practices.

But labor and SPUR agree on a few key points. Currently, the city has the ability to hire workers as provisional civil service appointments for as long as three years. The hiring of provisional workers is not subject to traditional testing and oversight in hiring attached to permanent civil service jobs. There is potential for abuse, as was demonstrated when a city worker was terminated and replaced by the brother of the manager. This unfairness is legal under the present system of provisional appointments. The hiring of the assessor's nephew is a more public example. SPUR in its April 5 report, "Reforming the Department of Human Resources," supports the union position of restricting the hiring of provisional workers.

A second operational efficiency identified by SPUR on which labor could agree is to increase worker training and educational opportunities and to require adequate training for all supervisors and mangers. Investment in education and training provides incentives, motivation, and job skills while adding value to the worker and taxpayer.

Consensus will be difficult on the recommendation to change the role of the Civil Service Commission to an appellate function and give the city's human resource director greater authority. What would be the system of checks and balances against a tyrannical position by this single individual? How would the individual worker fare in appealing a decision of the human resource director to the Civil Service Commission? The director would have an ongoing relationship with the commission and far greater knowledge of the intricacies of the appeal process. When the city hires and pays a hearing officer, as suggested in the SPUR report, how independent can we trust that officer to be?

SPUR proposes to "link job performance to layoff decisions." At first glance this sounds like a good idea, but what it means in practice is that managers would pick and choose who they want to lay off, because the managers write the performance assessments. Seniority is not a perfect system. But the reason labor organizations traditionally rely on seniority is because it's at least objective and clear-cut. Seniority also helps inoculate workers from the more insidious intolerance of a manger based on race, gender, disability, immigrant status, and sexual orientation, among other things.

Performance appraisals are not subject to the grievance procedure. If a subjective judgment by management is going to be the basis of compensation or continued employment, then the evaluations must be part of that process.

There is room for discussion on how we can improve the human resource functions in the city. We encourage the allocation of resources for adequate testing of qualified applicants for permanent civil service appointments. We join SPUR in strongly supporting the elimination of provisional and as-needed employees and requiring that managers and supervisors are trained on civil service rules to ensure consistency and fairness for workers.

Terry Rex Spray, R.N., is president of Service Employees International Union Local 790.