Anger at city workers is misplaced

With unemployment still at astronomical levels, budgets wildly out of balance and deep service cuts coming, it’s easy — too easy — to find someone to blame. Illegal immigrants? Check. Politicians? Check. Public employees? Ah, public employees. Double check.

Not that anyone has decided to go easy on immigrants or officeholders, but government workers are back in vogue as the lead villains of the failing economy. You know the rap: They’re overpaid, underworked, reading porn at their desks and retiring at age 40 on taxpayer-paid pensions.

That’s bunk. There are always some bad actors — consider, for example, the CBS-TV Channel 2 news video that allegedly showed L.A. Department of Water and Power employees at strip clubs while on the clock. But anger at public employees is misplaced. That’s something to keep in mind in the coming weeks as the City Council considers just how many people to lay off to make ends meet in the budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

At the root of public payroll problems quite often is poor management. Employees are generally happiest when they are allowed to do good work at a fair wage. When they become problems, it’s often because of irrational management decisions or lax supervision. When the rules are constantly shifting, when the goals are unclear, when leaders don’t lead, the quality of work suffers.

Are there too many city workers? If so, the workers themselves can hardly be blamed. They don’t hire each other. The decision to expand city programs was made in past budget years by the current and previous mayors and City Councils. Are workers paid too much? They can hardly be blamed for asking for the highest wages and the best medical and retirement benefits they can get. It’s the duty of management to protect the treasury and not give away the store.

The mayor and most members of the City Council got where they are, and may get where they’re going next, in large part because of support from city employee unions, so they have an incentive to go too easy in negotiations. But that fact of political life does not relieve them of the duty to put the city’s interests first. Now they must face up to their responsibilities as managers. As they cut, they must be certain — more certain than they were when expanding — that their actions comport with a rational and sustainable strategy for the city’s future.

That likely means layoffs, furloughs or both. But in trying to shrug off their own unpopularity, elected officials must not try to hide behind the current, and undeserved, unpopularity of city workers. Just as they must not retain employees merely to curry favor with unions, they must not indulge in an unnecessary purge to score points with angry voters. They must manage.