Recessions like the one this country recently experienced cause a lot of bad things.
The economy contracts. Unemployment increases. Wages stagnate. Savings are consumed by cash-strapped people and cash-strapped companies that can’t make ends meet on their reduced income or profits.
One good thing that can come out of a recession, however, is the belt-tightening that tends to make people and businesses more efficient. Sometimes it even causes outside-the-box thinking from executives who need to do more with less but can’t do so simply by continuing the same old same old.
On rare occasions that outside-the-box thinking even finds its way into the public sector, as we read about in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Park Ridge city manager to look at outsourcing jobs,” Oct. 9) reporting on how City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton announced at the October 6 Council meeting that he and his staff would begin exploring possible outsourcing of some City jobs.
But before the needle on the Richter Scale could even begin to jiggle, Hamilton promptly began backsliding into an acknowledgement that he might decide not to go in that direction once his outsourcing analysis is completed over the next few months.
If you want to bet on how that will end up, the smart money is going with the “under.”
Outsourcing – or, more accurately, talking about outsourcing – is becoming the flavor-of-the-month management tool among government bureaucrats who are only now finally figuring out, more than five years since the recession official ended (according to the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of U.S. recessions) that their units of government can’t keep paying those escalating wages and benefits they’ve been giving out for decades. Or at least not without raising taxes higher than most taxpayers are willing to accept.
In Hamilton’s case, however, he has a built-in excuse that doesn’t require him to wear the jacket for the City’s wage and benefit largesse that has gone on during his relatively short watch:
The Uptown TIF.
Hamilton said the impetus for his outsourcing initiative was the increasing Uptown TIF bond payments, which were back-end loaded by those irresponsible City officials who saddled Park Ridge taxpayers with that financial boondoggle a decade ago. Cynics might suggest that back-end loading was intended to ensure that the perpetrators of the Uptown TIF would be long-gone from public office before any real pain might begin to be felt. And in the case of Uptown TIF ringleaders like former mayor Ron Wietecha and former city manager Tim Schuenke, they would be long-gone from our community entirely.
Mayor David Schmidt sounded receptive to the idea when he noted that “everything has to be on the table” when figuring out ways for providing City services more cost-effectively. According to the H-A article, the number of full-time City employees has decreased 10% since FY2009-10, although some of that reduced manpower has been replaced with an increased number of part-time employees.
From the hour or so of research we were able to do by Googling “municipal outsourcing,” we have concluded that outsourcing is far more talk than action. One reason is that it has not yet proved to be the magic/silver bullet bureaucrats and elected officials alike were hoping for. Another reason is that municipal employee unions and their members view it like the ebola virus.
And despite what they say, bureaucrats don’t really want outsourcing because it reduces the size of their fiefdoms. It’s a lot harder to argue for more money when you are seen as managing less people because 20 city/school/park jobs have been outsourced to a private vendor. In Hamilton’s case we also have to question the legitimacy of his outsourcing initiative when its announcement comes with a “we-might-not-do-any-of-it” qualifier.
Even more tellingly, despite promoting unspecified “outsourcing” out of one side of his mouth, Hamilton has been arguing for returning the city attorney functions to an in-house position – despite the fact that the in-house position was abolished around a decade ago because the total cost was too high – due to so much of the work still having to be outsourced to private law firms.
So we’ll be interested to see whether Hamilton is really serious about outsourcing, or whether he’s just another lemming bureaucrat.
To read or post comments, click on title.
9 comments so far
For starters you could outsource some public works and non-sworn employees of the police and fire departments. But I share your skepticism about anything material being done on this front.
I would tend to agree with your conclusion that this outsourcing analysis will turn into nothing. What’s in it for Hamilton? Nothing. Just the opposite. So why is he doing this?
Of course union employees see outsourcing as the ebola virus. It has almost as devastating an effect on their families’ health and wellbeing, altho it may take a little longer. How’d you like to work a “flexible” shift meaning “any 30 hours out of the 168 hours in a week the employer wants” so you can’t even get a second job to make up for the unliving wage you get for that 30 hours? How’d you like to have no health insurance except for whatever Obamacare has to offer — assuming you live in a blue state — and no health care at all if you live in a red one?
How…oh, never mind. Just please stop acting like it’s somehow weird or wrong for taxpayers other than yourself to want to survive and maybe thrive.
EDITOR’S NOTE: When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence about inalienable rights like “life” and “liberty,” he also included “the pursuit of happiness.” Not the right to or guaranty of happiness, but only the right and opportunity to pursue it. Those are the rights our government was designed to ensure – not some bubble-wrapped, no-risk, no adversity existence funded by the taxpayers.
Generations of Americans moved from 30-hour-per-week “flexible” shift jobs to better ones by working harder, upgrading their skills or changing their occupations. As the bar boss in one relatively obscure but cultish movie says to the bartender he just fired when that bartender asks what he’s supposed to do now: “There’s always barber college.”
“Those are the rights our government was designed to ensure – not some bubble-wrapped, no-risk, no adversity existence funded by the taxpayers.”
Amen.
Tres droll. And generations now voting and opining with your kind of scorn can forget they owe their parents’ and grandparents’ experience as lowly but thriving union labor for the bedrock they now stand on, trumpeting their superiority.
Lucky for you you aren’t in law school today.
And how are people who can’t make ends meet or work a regular schedule supposed to pay for and attend programs to upgrade their skills and change their occupations — and to what occupations? You don’t think the nice gal who makes your Starbuck’s coffee on Saturday deserves the basics of life? Guess not. There’s always more where she came from, eh? And besides, it’s her fault she’s not you.
EDITOR’S NOTE: During his lifetime this editor has been a proud dues-paying member of four different PRIVATE-SECTOR labor unions which actually fought the heated and dangerous battles that brought an end to sweatshops and child labor, gave us the minimum wage and 40-hour work week, were the prime movers behind Social Security, equal pay for equal work, workplace safety, sick leave, pensions, and countless other benefits on which public-sector unions have ridden for free while colluding with venal and corrupt politicians to bleed the taxpayers and ruin this state.
But if you think that nice gal behind the counter at Starbucks’s on Saturday (or any other day) deserves more money or better benefits, write Howard Schultz and demand she be paid more; and if that doesn’t work, stop patronizing his business. Do the same with every other business where you don’t believe the employees are being paid a fair wage. And stop buying all those clothes that come from countries who let their citizens get exploited.
And, yes, it very well may be her fault that she’s not this editor, just like it’s highly likely it’s this editor’s fault that he’s not Howard Schultz, Ben Affleck, Jonathan Toews, or Barack Obama. Unequal outcomes are the way the world has always worked – too bad that doesn’t suit your from each to each philosophy.
In response to the post re outsourcing:
Have you been following what has happened in the private sector job market lately and the number of jobs that have been eliminated. Why should the government sector be any different?
If you are unhappy in your job find a new one.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Exactly, although that principle got lost in translation from the private to the public sector, where politicians can buy votes with taxpayer money paid to public employees without regard for pesky things like profits or even budgets.
Interesting how bureaucrats so often operate by misdirection. An outsourcing initiative provides cover for bringing outsourced services in house. The more of this I see, the more I believe it is all just a game to the bureaucrats that they are playing with our money.
EDITOR’S NOTE: While being paid six-figure salaries, bennies and pensions with our money.
Bureaucrats must be watched and questioned and held accountable just as any other employee sector is. But if you think the solution to inefficiency and not enough jobs is more Americans working for subsistence pay in dangerous conditions, you haven’t read your history. Karma is a bitch.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We aren’t advocating for “subsistence pay” or “dangerous conditions.” But we also aren’t advocating for public-sector make-work jobs or inflated wages that make American-made goods price non-competitive with foreign-made goods that people like yourself purchase for your personal economic advantage.
I am a downmarket Dunkin’Donuts coffee kinda guy, but I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. Ever. And I pay attention to the kinds of misbehavior other big retailers pull. And you ARE advocating for subsistence pay if you think Rauner and other billionaires are right in thinking minimum wage doesn’t need to be raised. Personally, as a taxpayer I’m sick of providing tax breaks to the Walton heirs in the form of public aid for their workers whom they cheat and rob in such an un-Christian way. Between jerks like Madigan and monsters like Old-People-Don’t-Matter Rauner, it’s no contest as far as the 99% are concerned.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We neither support nor oppose an increase in minimum wage, although we do share the concerns expressed by both Warren Buffett and Bill Gates about the effects of raising the minimum wage on job creation.
You’ve got your “jerks” and “monsters” reversed, but class warriors seem to do that pretty consistently.
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>