Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 5, 1993 TAG: 9311300382
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRANK GREVE KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
You know the rest, right? The part-time worker gets the boot. But this is the federal government, and the rules are different here.
Firing a government worker is so hard "only somebody who aggressively seeks to be terminated" is likely to be, says James King, director of the Office of Personnel Management.
After the knockdown, a representative of the American Federation of Government Employees intervened on the assailant's behalf "simply to assure her a fair hearing," the official says.
The office at the Labor Department had a history of strained relations between its lawyers, most of them white like Clinton, and its support staff, most of them black like the part-time worker.
Ultimately, Clinton's boss, Marc Machiz, and his superiors decided not to fire the worker but to transfer her. With the transfer came a permanent job and a $3,890 raise.
"It was shocking," says Clinton. "But a lot of managers don't like confrontations. I understand that."
Supervisor Machiz won't discuss the case, but lots of federal supervisors feel for him. They say firing anyone has become so tricky and time-consuming, and the repercussions so fearsome, that getting tough simply doesn't pay.
Convinced they'll fail - or, worse yet, be punished for acting unfairly - managers are simply not using reforms passed by the Carter administration to discipline federal workers.
"You go through the removal of one person from the federal service, you're not going to do it quickly again," concedes King, the administration's top personnel official.
Statistics bear him out. If you can imagine America's civil service bureaucracy reduced to a single office of 100 workers, one would be fired for serious misconduct every 10 years. One would resign under management pressure every 15 years. And one would be fired for incompetence every 70 years.
No good figures exist for the private sector. But compared to the only other tax-financed bureaucracy of comparable size - the uniformed military, surviving in the federal workplace is a cinch.
According to Pentagon records, 5,600 soldiers were dismissed for incompetence from a force of 1.8 million in 1992. By comparison, 293 of 2.2 million civil servants were fired for incompetence last year, according to King's statisticians.
"If you pass your probationary period, you have a job, as a matter of law, for as long as you want it," says King.
A dense thicket of civil service protections are one factor that prevents federal managers from firing problem employees. Strong unions - representing about half of all federal workers, versus 16 percent of private sector employees - are another.
A third big deterrent, managers say, is the intimidating number of bias claims filed by federal workers. One study found federal employees file 12 times more complaints than private-sector workers with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Another study found they go to court more than three times as often.
About half the government workers who make EEOC claims allege bias because they are black, Hispanic, women or over 40. Thousands more claim to be whistle-blowers; physically or mentally handicapped; victims of ethnic, religious or reverse discrimination; or - one of the largest categories - reprisals by bosses after they made other bias claims.
Few workers win their cases outright, but so many win negotiated settlements that Joe Dugger, 47, a Commerce Department computer specialist, says, "I've known eight or 10 people who got fired over the last 20 years. I just don't know anybody who stayed fired."
Among recent examples:
A letter carrier was given his job back after he pleaded guilty to statutory rape of a 14-year-old. (She wasn't on his route.)
A Defense Department security guard was put back on the job he'd slept on. (He's now a recovering alcoholic.)
A nonperforming secretary was reinstated and transferred. (Coping with bad bosses induced a mental handicap they had to accommodate.)
A retirement-eligible biologist was reinstated even though it took him four months to complete tasks that took peers two days. (Supervisors failed to tell him precisely what "too slow" meant.)
Problem workers aren't news to Vice President Al Gore. When his National Performance Review team asked bureaucrats what needed fixing in the bureaucracy, inability to oust nonperformers was the most common complaint. Three out of four former Bush administration appointees said the same in an exit survey last year.
Gore's "reinventing government" plan urges that removals be faster, but asks Congress to decide how. A Senate proposal would beef up the EEOC's investigative staff to clear a backlog of more than 17,000 federal complaints whose average age is 379 days.
Whether cases come before the EEOC or less prominent review agencies like the Merit Systems Protection Board or the Federal Labor Relations Authority, they all have the same effect: "They make the manager the defendant," says lawyer and former bureaucrat Jerry Shaw, whose Washington firm often represents embattled supervisors. "That's the problem. That's why managers don't fire people."
"Absolute bunk!" sputters lawyer Irving Kator, whose firm defends lots of terminated workers. "If a manager's got a good case, there's no reason for them to be afraid. They only get screwed when they don't follow the regulations they've made up."
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 says workers warned of incompetence can be fired if they fail to meet explicit standards within 30 days. The rub: Workers fight bad ratings as hard as they fight removals. As a result, cowed managers rate only one in 500 unsatisfactory.
Loopholes abound for those who decide to fight a dismissal. If a manager kept a book on the ousted employee, were the same records kept for all? Were voices ever raised, betraying "animus" against the worker? If the worker filed grievances against the manager, were they studiously ignored?
One effect has been a tripling of the bias complaint rate against managers who tried to fire people from 1988 to 1991, according to the EEOC's latest report.
At the Agriculture Department,managers must "avoid complaints" and "actively pursue" settlement of old discrimination cases to earn top ratings and bonuses from Secretary Mike Espy. Building "a new management culture," is the goal, he explains in a covering memo.
"Getting tough can't help you," says an Energy Department official. And if an ousted worker finds a forum in the secretary's office, "it probably means some assistant will come down to you and say, `Make this problem go away.'
"Suddenly everybody wants to water the dismissal down to a transfer or a 30-day suspension. You can't help yourself. Suddenly that seems like a good idea."
by CNB