Outsourcing the City
By Kevin Robinson in News on Jul 9, 2007 1:30PM
An interesting tidbit caught our eye in Friday's Tribune. After decades of patronage and questionable hiring practices in the city, Daley is now planning to outsource municipal hiring. Recent hiring scandals here have included the placement of a politically connected teenager in a building inspector position (which requires more job experience than he had working years). Along with this came the conviction in federal court of four close Daley aides for conspiring to rig the city's hiring process to favor job candidates with political clout. All of this led to the creation of a $12 million fund to compensate "victims" who can demonstrate that they missed out on city jobs as a result of patronage.
According to the Tribune, 14 firms have been invited to bid on the five-year contract, which will come with two one-year options. Daley's interest in engaging the private sector in the hiring process should come as no surprise to anyone that followed the last municipal election. After failing to win the endorsement of several unions in the last election, and then facing outright challenges by the labor movement in many wards, Daley has an interest in making sure that he can start to cut out the clout that many unions have in the realm of city hiring.
One of the opening salvos in what will surely be a long and drawn-out battle waged just under the radar was the city's award of a five-year security guard contract for O'Hare and Midway to Universal Security, a non-union security guard firm. While privatization can be the death knell for many of the public sector unions, making sure that taxpayer-financed contracts go to unionized firms not only means that people working to serve the public are paid a fair wage, it also ensures that companies are competing for business not with the lowest wages (which Universal appears to have done), but with the most efficient processes, the whole point of contracting out government work.
All of this raises questions of what is inherently governmental, and what happens when a government body starts to contract itself out. There is no question that the private sector can do many things more efficiently and effectively that the government (such as janitorial and landscaping services). But do we really want to let a government begin to privatize the very office that governs the employment of its own workers? Adding another layer to an already bureaucratic process will only make oversight more difficult, and accountability yet another step removed from an already fractured system. What's more, with the city's long history of contracting shenanigans and hiring improprieties (if not outright illegality), there is certainly no guarantee that this contract (lucrative financially, certainly, but also politically) won't go to a connected firm, giving Daley even more authority to guide hiring. Even that perpetual pain in the mayor's ass, Michael Shakman, is skeptical. We're not skeptical, however; we're certain that this is just another excuse, another opportunity, to side-step real reform in Chicago in favor of more power-brokering.
Image via Washington Post.