Hi Greg, interesting post as usual! One question I have about this is how would an increased flexibility of civil servant managers to hire (and more importantly fire) interact with union representation?
Great question! The honest answer is that I have no idea/it would probably vary, since there are thousands of unions across the levels of government and often many within even a single government. So a lot would depend on the specifics of each union contract, as well as each state’s laws (for non-federal).
That said, one thought (on the employee-removal side of things) is that when negotiating new union contracts, there could be an opportunity to do an exchange of “we’ll increase baseline pay rates across the board, but in exchange get more flexibility to remove low performers.”
That said, as an example of how challenging things can be here… a senior leader in a city in New York State once told me that for them (and maybe across the entire state?!) it is illegal to evaluate the job performance of a unionized employee. So, there are definitely challenges here.
Hi Greg, interesting post as usual! One question I have about this is how would an increased flexibility of civil servant managers to hire (and more importantly fire) interact with union representation?
Great question! The honest answer is that I have no idea/it would probably vary, since there are thousands of unions across the levels of government and often many within even a single government. So a lot would depend on the specifics of each union contract, as well as each state’s laws (for non-federal).
That said, one thought (on the employee-removal side of things) is that when negotiating new union contracts, there could be an opportunity to do an exchange of “we’ll increase baseline pay rates across the board, but in exchange get more flexibility to remove low performers.”
That said, as an example of how challenging things can be here… a senior leader in a city in New York State once told me that for them (and maybe across the entire state?!) it is illegal to evaluate the job performance of a unionized employee. So, there are definitely challenges here.
This is quite interesting!
Not something I ever thought about, thanks for sharing :)
Thanks for reading!
Nice graphics—very well-designed!
Thanks!