Gov. Scott Walker Takes on Civil Service System

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

Sep 25, 2015

 

Burned on the presidential campaign trail, Gov. Scott Walker has hit the ground running back in Madison, seeking to pile up his “throne of skulls” even higher. His latest target: the state civil service system, which he says is inefficient and ill-suited to the realities of the twenty-first century workforce. The Journal Sentinel reports:

 

 

Just three days after ending his presidential run, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker sought to reassert his conservative credentials Thursday by backing a proposed overhaul of the state’s civil service system for 30,000 employees, saying its safeguards against political patronage in hiring and firing state workers need to keep up with the times and the crush of retiring baby boomers.

 

Four years after repealing most collective bargaining for most public employees, Walker and two top Republican lawmakers are seeking to: eliminate the state’s civil service exams, replacing them with a résumé-based system for merit hiring; stop allowing longtime employees to avoid termination by “bumping” other workers with less seniority out of their jobs; and shorten by more than half the process for employees to appeal their dismissal or discipline.

 

 

(Snip)

 

Whether Walker’s particular brand of reform is the right way to downsize our bloated and inefficient public sector remains to be seen. And even as the ongoing trends mentioned above should change how we run government, some offices and bureaus will still need long-term service from well-qualified professionals. But it is clear that major reform is needed, and its ironic that the people most resistant to any kind of reform—public sector unions, blue model Democrats—are also the people who depend most on an active and effective federal government. Reform-oriented politicians across the country should be experimenting with new models and seeing how the voters and taxpayers—not the public employees—respond. As Scott Walker has shown before in Wisconsin, these two groups don’t always see eye-to-eye.