The "Sacrifice" of Public Service

Bird of Prey said:

I would rather the government run healthcare and mass transit any day to some greedy company looking to maximize profits. I mean, really. I remember a case in California where the insurance company denied a procedure that could have saved a young man's life. Thank God there's a little justice. I think the court awarded his family something like 20 million.

There are certain areas where we simply can't afford corporate management. Let corporations manufacture trinkets. They love paying thirty-five cents an hour overseas. In fact, I wish they'd just move their headquarters and all their greedy management to China.

Click to expand...

I guess in either case there will be sacrifices. If companies aren't profit driven you will sacrifice efficiency, quality, etc.

If they're profit driven then, occassionally you will sacrifice compassion. (if only there could be a middle ground in all cases.)

Of course you can always find examples of an insurance company not acting ethically, but that can be countered with people that have been helped in many many ways by their insurance companies.

Not all companies are run by the greedy. Not all corporations are out for only the dollar and nothing else. Actually that's really not good business IMO, but what do I know?

Gretad08 said:

I guess in either case there will be sacrifices. If companies aren't profit driven you will sacrifice efficiency, quality, etc.

If they're profit driven then, occassionally you will sacrifice compassion. (if only there could be a middle ground in all cases.)

Of course you can always find examples of an insurance company not acting ethically, but that can be countered with people that have been helped in many many ways by their insurance companies.

Not all companies are run by the greedy. Not all corporations are out for only the dollar and nothing else. Actually that's really not good business IMO, but what do I know?

Click to expand...

But I think it has become "good business" in the eyes of most of corporate America.

You're in a car accident. You have full coverage. Car's totaled. What does the insurance company do, and it's standard operating procedure?

dclary said:

There's a reason why the phrase "good enough for government work" exists.

Click to expand...

Yes, there's a reason. The reason is that it's a mixture of some truth, a lot of myth, and a lot of jealousy and uninformed resentment.

Bird of Prey said:

But I think it has become "good business" in the eyes of most of corporate America.

You're in a car accident. You have full coverage. Car's totaled. What does the insurance company do, and it's standard operating procedure?

Click to expand...

I'm going to respectfully disagree Bird. Of course there are greedy people who work in corporate America...the kind of people that we hear stories about who don't keep the customers best interest at heart, but there are good people running the show out there too.

In my experience (I totalled a car about 4 years ago) they paid me for the car. I arranged for other transportation while I shopped for a new one, and I took the insurance money to make that purchase.

Pretty simple. There wasn't much hassle on their end. The biggest pain was arranging for other transportation but that was my problem, not theirs.

Don said:

The business model rewards efficiency; the bureaucratic model rewards inefficiency.

Click to expand...

Correct. And that means--for the most part--that comparable activities will be handled less efficiently by governments than by private concerns.

Of course, that's not an absolute. And bureaucracies exist outside the government. Many large corporations can suffer from bureaucratic "ailments," as well. A good example of this is the differing fates of Prodigy, America Online, and Compuserve.

That said, some activities shouldn't be about efficiency, first and foremost. Other concerns are more important. For example: law enforcement. Privatize police forces and they would be writing tickets like nobody's business. But that's not the principle component of their job. Ditto for the IRS. You think it's bad now, imagine if it was being run for profit and profit alone (I know it's job is mostly to maximize revenues, but controls--via the bureaucracy--still exist).

THAT said, the inefficiency of typical bureaucracies at local, state, and federal levels is a reflection of a reality: bureaucrats are conditioned by bureaucracies to serve themselves, not citizens or customers. There's no motivation in a DMV to be efficient. Clock-in, clock-out at the same times regardless, move up by not screwing up and by simple seniority, etc.

robeiae said:

Correct. And that means--for the most part--that comparable activities will be handled less efficiently by governments than by private concerns.

Of course, that's not an absolute. And bureaucracies exist outside the government. Many large corporations can suffer from bureaucratic "ailments," as well. A good example of this is the differing fates of Prodigy, America Online, and Compuserve.

That said, some activities shouldn't be about efficiency, first and foremost. Other concerns are more important. For example: law enforcement. Privatize police forces and they would be writing tickets like nobody's business. But that's not the principle component of their job. Ditto for the IRS. You think it's bad now, imagine if it was being run for profit and profit alone (I know it's job is mostly to maximize revenues, but controls--via the bureaucracy--still exist).

THAT said, the inefficiency of typical bureaucracies at local, state, and federal levels is a reflection of a reality: bureaucrats are conditioned by bureaucracies to serve themselves, not citizens or customers. There's no motivation in a DMV to be efficient. Clock-in, clock-out at the same times regardless, move up by not screwing up and by simple seniority, etc.

Click to expand...

Well said

Gretad08 said:

I'm going to respectfully disagree Bird. Of course there are greedy people who work in corporate America...the kind of people that we hear stories about who don't keep the customers best interest at heart, but there are good people running the show out there too.

In my experience (I totalled a car about 4 years ago) they paid me for the car. I arranged for other transportation while I shopped for a new one, and I took the insurance money to make that purchase.

Pretty simple. There wasn't much hassle on their end. The biggest pain was arranging for other transportation but that was my problem, not theirs.

Click to expand...

When they paid you for the car, did you simply accept how they valued it??

Bird of Prey said:

When they paid you for the car, did you simply accept how they valued it??

Click to expand...

It wasn't that far off...maybe $300 or so less than what we expected, but when I went shopping for a new car that's about what they were selling for.

Bird of Prey said:

When they paid you for the car, did you simply accept how they valued it??

Click to expand...

I've totalled two cars while having AAA auto insurance. AAA's policy is not to pay high or low blue book. They pay actual replacement costs: to whit, they go to three auto dealers in the area selling the same or as similar a car as they can find, and find out how much it would cost to buy another one, and they write a check for that much.

In both cases, because my wife and I bargain shopped, AAA gave us far in excess than we had originally paid for our car. I bought a new Rav4 for the money they paid me when I crashed my used one.

I bought a Mercedez ML500 with the money they gave me for the new Rav.

robeiae said:

THAT said, the inefficiency of typical bureaucracies at local, state, and federal levels is a reflection of a reality: bureaucrats are conditioned by bureaucracies to serve themselves, not citizens or customers. There's no motivation in a DMV to be efficient. Clock-in, clock-out at the same times regardless, move up by not screwing up and by simple seniority, etc.

Click to expand...

Bureaucracies tend not to have to compete with other players at the same time -- though some services are market-tested against privatisation. But that's not the only incentive for efficiency.

The biggest incentive for public-sector efficiency is government's desire to be re-elected. An ageing population means a growing demand for services and a dwindling tax-base. The bigger the proportion of tax revenue that can be spent on services or returned to taxpayers, the happier a government will be. Bureaucrats are required to show loyalty to the government of the day, but the government has no requirement to reciprocate.

In the Australian federal scene, bureaucrats are sometimes fired in their thousands. Since our federal capital is a government town that often means they have to up-root families and relocate to another city. This is every bit as traumatic as when a car-worker gets laid off.

Across the last 30 years there have been numerous public sector reforms in Australian federal government, from process-focus to customer-focus, from APS entitlement and rights to performance-based pay, from obfuscation to accountability. Permanent secretaries have become secretaries on 3 year contracts. Executive perquisites have been stripped. The 'job for life' promise has been made conditional on job places and minimal performance standards. The Australian Productivity Commission was chartered 11 years ago to provide independent review of microeconomic policy and regulation. Revision to the Public Service Act caused the creation of a Merit Protection Commissioner with oversight of APS employment and whistleblowing. The Australian National Audit Office routinely conducts hundreds of performance audits per year.

As a consultant to government and a tax-payer I certainly find causes for frustration, but as a customer of large private-sector utilities I do too. In fairness, I believe that some of the services provided by federal government (for example our e-tax system for personal income tax) represents best practice in quality and efficiency of service.

I think that you can get very different government bureaucracies depending on what sort of bureaucracy your elected officials cause to be created. Whatever experience one has with government bureaucracy, I don't think one can generalise to all buraucracies from just those limited experiences.

Without getting into the entertaining run of cliches, that graph strikes me as comparing apples and oranges, with no information concerning actual comparative jobs and their compensation. What do accountants, civil engineers, attorneys of various kinds, biological scientists, etc., earn comparatively, Fed v. Private employment? Just citing "average" compensation is likely very misleading, considering that the job spectrum of Fed employment almost certainly doesn't include anywhere near as many people in low-wage fields as does the total private-job spectrum. How many Federal employees are manning retail sales counters, for example? Bussing tables? Collecting garbage? Cleaning windows?

The Feds (and states and cities, too, for that matter) don't hire people directly for those kinds of low-wage jobs. They contract to the private sector for stuff like that.

caw

Ruv Draba said:

I think that you can get very different government bureaucracies depending on what sort of bureaucracy your elected officials cause to be created. Whatever experience one has with government bureaucracy, I don't think one can generalise to all buraucracies from just those limited experiences.

Click to expand...

My generalization is with regard to how bureaucracies function, based on historical reality. It does NOT generalize to ALL bureaucracies, and I didn't say that. I said "typical."

I don't often comment in this here political forum, but I read it often. I had to put my two cents in and agree with blacbird that, regardless your personal feelings on size of government, etc, that graph is an eyesore. No social scientist worth a grain of salt would take it seriously. The factors that truly affect pay - education level, where education was obtained, number of years of professional employment, specialist skills, job performance - are missing from the graph. Forget that it's almost impossible to get a Fed job without at least an undergraduate degree - I know two Fed employees with two master's degrees - and we're supposed to compare that to the lifetime auto sales counterperson? Please.

Not only that, but the highest paid jobs in government will never, ever, ever begin to compete with the ridiculous multi-million $ packages private sector CEOs are making.

Anecdotal info: My husband, a student of economics, was offered two jobs after he finished hs undergrad: working for a privately owned utilities company for $55,000/year or working for the Fed for $41,000/year. He would have gone with the Fed, because he has a passion for PUBLIC SERVICE. In the end, he pursued graduate studies so that he could get the job he really wanted in public service (which required a master's).

I also think that these statistics are misleading, as many often are. They factor in "benefits", a vague term that can include insurance, pensions, 401k's, vacation days, sick days, etc.

For one thing, a gov't job has about the best insurance and pension plan going. Most businesses, in order to cut down on expenses, opt for lesser packages.

So, it naturally falls to reason that as medical costs have been rising and many businesses are whittling down their insurance policies and passing more of the cost onto the employee, the cost of the gov't's "benefits" package , which bears a larger share of the brunt, has increasingly risen.

I'm a former federal government employee and when we moved from Alaska, I could've transferred to a job in Tenessee. I, however, chose to go back into the 'private sector' because I could make more money.

I was hired by the government because of my education and experience and the necessity of people with my skills. I was a Registered Nurse with 3 college degrees.

The benefits were great, but I went with the private sector and have regretted it ever since. I was a Patient Safety Manager at a DOD facility and I could actually see the effects and influence of my job. In the private sector, I just worked for managed care organizations and never saw much reflection of my efforts except on the corporate level.

Ultimately, I wish I'd remained with the government. Less money, but more job satisfaction.

Diana Hignutt said:

Sure, it's a generalization. However, since our company is largely in business to do the work that paid public employees should be doing (eg. a big one: removing "rags" caught up in sewage pump impellers), a I make my living based on this...my generalization stands up to the test.

Click to expand...

Yes. Your sweeping generalizations based on anecdotal experience in an unnamed company in an unnamed industry would stand up very well to an unnamed test.

What did Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq get paid in comparison to soldiers?

How much is the president of the United States make as opposed to CEO of Exxon?

My dad was a small town mayor for thirty years. He worked his tail off to benefit the community, for a nominal salary. The town clerk, dispatcher (who dealt with avalanche control issues as well as police ones) and city manager/assistant to the mayor were all hard working, incredibly competent people who could easily have made more in the private sector. The JP, who held court twice a month, was an intelligent, balanced and thoughtful man

The whole "government can't do anything right" trope and the categorizing of people in the public sector as overpaid buffoons is just not reflective of reality.

robeiae said:

My generalization is with regard to how bureaucracies function, based on historical reality. It does NOT generalize to ALL bureaucracies, and I didn't say that. I said "typical."

Click to expand...

But they don't function that way intrinsically, and not because they're public organisations which is why I made the point. Bias can lead one to drawing the wrong lessons from history. (That bias is evident in your sweeping statement about public servant motivation, for example.)

All organisations get sluggish tendencies in response to high revenues and large scales of operation. Read Lou Gerstner's book Who Says Elephants Can't Dance, for instance -- which talks about the kind of IBM he found in 1993. We notice public sector sluggishness more often because that sector provides all of us with services. We talk about it more often because democracy encourages us to. On the other hand much private sector sluggishness and inefficiency passes unnoticed unless we're customers or shareholders. And when we do notice sluggishness and inefficiency in (say) large private utilities we don't say it's because they're large, but because they're utilities.

In my experience, what imposes greater efficiency on an organisation is not competition but contraction. Organisations only begin to increase efficiency when revenues or profit margins fall. They either innovate to increase efficiency or (more commonly) increase efficiency at the expense of both staff and customers (when was the last time you spoke to a person when seeking service from a large organisation? ). Competition can lead to contraction, but not always (e.g. when a sector is in growth). In Australia it's become usual to impose a 'productivity dividend' on federal government agencies to create that contractive pressure. In other words, they get less money each year to manage the same administered budgets. It's unpleasant for the staff and managers, but it seems to work. Having worked closely with dozens of public and private sector organisations, I'd say that a productivity dividend is more effective when government expenditure is expanding than competition is for the private sector when it's in growth.

Ruv Draba said:

But they don't function that way intrinsically, and not because they're public organisations which is why I made the point. Bias can lead one to drawing the wrong lessons from history. (That bias is evident in your sweeping statement about public servant motivation, for example.)

Click to expand...

Some do, some don't. And it's not limited to "public organisations." Bureaucracies are bureaucracies, whether private or public in nature.

And my sweeping statement re "public servant motivation" was not about the servants at all. It was about the conditions.

I think your back is up here and I'm not sure why, exactly. There's no bias of the sort you want to see in my observations, at all. Bureaucracies function in ways that can be and have been analyzed. You're limited in the range of your analysis. Consider the bureaucracies of the Soviet Empire, of China for the past several thousand years, of the Roman Empire, etc, etc.

All organisations get sluggish tendencies in response to high revenues and large scales of operation. Read Lou Gerstner's book Who Says Elephants Can't Dance, for instance -- which talks about the kind of IBM he found in 1993.

Click to expand...

I've read it. Did you completely miss my example given earlier of Prodigy, Compuserve, and America Online? Do you know that story?

We notice public sector sluggishness more often because that sector provides all of us with services.

Click to expand...

And did you completely miss my point re efficiency not being the principle concern of all government bureaucracies?

robeiae said:

Bureaucracies are bureaucracies, whether private or public in nature.

Click to expand...

'Bureaucracy' means 'rule from the desk'. The usage dates to the early 18th century, and describes administration characterised by process and adhesion to rules.

For all that the term has now become pejorative (connoting inefficiency and poor productivity), bureacracies are actually a major achievement of civilisation. Paper-shuffling (or clay-tablet shuffling in the early days ) represents humanity's early efforts in information management and process automation. Bureaucracy has been an underpinning of large-scale social order -- enabling a uniform legal system, collection of taxes, creation of roads and economic infrastructure, distribution of food during famines, census-taking, standardised schooling and many other trappings of sophisticated civilisations.

And my sweeping statement re "public servant motivation" was not about the servants at all. It was about the conditions.

Click to expand...

Understood, but here's your statement again:

THAT said, the inefficiency of typical bureaucracies at local, state, and federal levels is a reflection of a reality: bureaucrats are conditioned by bureaucracies to serve themselves, not citizens or customers.

Click to expand...

The underlining is mine. I think it's true to say that bureaucracies often grow to serve themselves, with processes and rules existing simply because they exist. But that's not the same as saying that bureaucrats are conditioned to serve themselves. (The USA may have an aggressive foreign policy but that doesn't entitle me to make the generalisation that 'Americans are aggressive overseas'.)

At core, bureaucracies serve the policies of their administration. That administration may or may not serve the needs of citizens and customers. What frustrates customers most when dealing with bureaucracy is that they can't negotiate with it -- they can't find a person to talk to who acts like a person.

But bureaucracies are difficult for the people who work in them too. Some find it comfortable to be a cog in the machinery, but many don't. Over time many of the mechanical jobs of government are increasingly being done by computer, while the jobs requiring intelligence, discretion and judgement are being done by people. When it's done right, the level of service increases dramatically, as does the level of worker satisfaction.

Two examples from my personal experience are the e-tax system in Australia that allows the average citizen to complete and lodge an income tax return in around 30 minutes without external help (it used to take hours here, and you needed an accountant); and motor vehicle registration in the Australian Capital Territory where I live -- as much as possible has been automated and streamlined; everything else is run by people who are proud of the work they do, and seem to really enjoy dealing with people. I used to dread renewing my driver's license or completing transfer of vehicle ownership papers; now it's a half-hour visit every five years for the first, and mailing in a form for the second.

My back isn't up on the matter. I just think that picking on the moral character of bureaucrats just because they work in bureaucracy is an exercise in prejudice.

I've worked public, private, military and civilian. Currently I work for the state and the county. avg 50-60 hours a week because we've cut budget almost in half, and reduced workforce by almost 60%. (There were three of me when I got the job. One retired. The other is in an unnamed location never to be heard from again. -- ok, actually, he retired, too.)

All but one of the public sector jobs I've had have been small - medium businesses ruled entirely via nepotism. I left one because I was as high as I could get without marrying the boss' daughter, and my wife said no.

I've seen sloth and slowdown, heroism and Customer Service with a capital C on all sides of it.

Which way things went usually ccame down to management and personal responsibility.

Well, there are differences between the ratio of American and Australian government employees. Almost half of the households in the US have someone working for the government directly or indirectly, or receiving some government benefit. Politicians have created a constituency and supporters of the state by doling out money.

It's no surprise that those defending the pay of government workers are government workers or family of government workers...

Fullback said:

Well, there are differences between the ratio of American and Australian government employees. Almost half of the households in the US have someone working for the government directly or indirectly, or receiving some government benefit.

Click to expand...

I think that it would be a mistake to confuse 'receiving some government benefit' with 'working for the government', and it's certainly a mistake to confuse working directly and indirectly for the government. If you work directly for the government then you work under government conditions and with government processes; if you work indirectly for the government then you may be under entirely different conditions and processes.

In Australia there are around 1.75M employees in Federal, State/Territory and local governments. There are around 10.75M people employed, so public sector employment is around 16% of total jobs; I don't know how that compares to the US. But just about everyone gets some sort of government benefit here -- we have a hybrid public/private health system for instance, so if you go and get a blood cholesterol test say, that will be covered under the public system. If you go to a dentist then you either pay for that yourself, or your private health provider may contribute toward it (don't ask me why it works that way; it's just historical).

It's no surprise that those defending the pay of government workers are government workers or family of government workers...

Click to expand...

In other words, those who know the business and the workers?

I run a consulting company that works mainly for government customers. (There's no special reason that our customers are mainly government -- it just happens to be geography; in previous roles I've had private-sector clients too). It's not directly material to my business what government employees get paid, but my business does allow me to get to know their work and their characters intimately, and across a lot of different agencies and I get to see the end-to-end operation of many different services. It's cheap and easy to pick on the gnomes of bureaucracy ; I think it's also pretty uninformed.

I'm in the public sector. I bust my ass off at my job. Sure, there's bureaucracy, but my boss manages to take the brunt of it leaving me with good independence.

As for pay, like blacbird said, it's overly simplistic to compare everything in one package. Receptionists and mail clerks and other non-professional careers will get paid better in government. When it comes to scientists, engineers, economists, etc... the pay is significantly less. And there's little hope of getting a bonus for a job well done other than a pat on the back. And there are a lot of fringe benefits that I'm missing (eg. I can't take hockey tickets from a service company we might be doing business with because it might impact some regulatory decisions I'm involved with). I'm taking significantly less pay than I could in the private sector just so I can have some job security and because it's public service (ie. part of my job is to look after the public interest) and it feels good to do it.

Like I said, I bust my ass off at my job. Most of those around me work the same way, so I have a hard time envisioning us as lazy government workers.