Of obstacles
and bungling
Making government
By Rob Perez
more efficient is a
tough task
Star-BulletinThe county of Hawaii pays six water department workers extra just to show up for work each day.
After putting in a day's work, for which they get their regular salary, the six also get paid to drive home.
The unusual mileage reimbursements stem from a dispute the Big Island government lost five years ago to the United Public Workers, the union representing the six employees.
While the amount involved -- no more than about $300 a month -- is a drop in the bucket for the county, the case underscores a far greater problem:
For all the gains Hawaii's collective bargaining system has won for state and county workers the past three decades, it contributes to a government bureaucracy saddled with inefficiencies.
By virtue of a sometimes unwieldy set of collective bargaining and civil service regulations, some of which haven't changed in decades, the system is designed to reward workers for seniority and tenure, not productivity and performance.
It's a system that many say doesn't jibe with the public's demand for greater government efficiencies.And even when changes are attempted to save taxpayers' money, the process often is laborious, sometimes stretching over years. Adopting new technology quickly is a particular problem, managers say.
Indeed, union contracts give labor leaders near veto power over any government decisions that change work conditions, even if no union jobs are lost.
"At every level, it makes it extremely difficult to make changes to get anything done," said Mayor Jeremy Harris.
That's why the city, despite nearly a decade of trying, still hasn't converted many of the island's garbage routes to an automated collection system -- a move Harris says will save taxpayers millions of dollars annually. City officials say UPW, which represents refuse workers, has created one roadblock after another.
UPW head Gary Rodrigues said the delays stem from city bungling, not union resistance or system inflexibilities. "That is an excuse incompetent management uses all the time," Rodrigues said.
Outside experts, however, have echoed the city's arguments.
A mainland consultant who came to Honolulu in 1994 to study operations of four large city departments still remembers how difficult managers had it here.
"I don't think I can tell you one city I worked in where collective bargaining has had as much of a constraint on managers' ability (to manage) as in Honolulu," said Bill Evans, a general management consultant who has analyzed governments in more than 400 cities and counties nationwide.
"Absolutely our hands are tied," said Harris. "Many times we see opportunities for efficiencies that we're unable to implement because of collective bargaining, civil service or some other legal impediment."
Union as scapegoat
But some people -- not just union leaders -- argue that making the unions the scapegoats for an inefficient system is unfair.The unions, they say, are just doing their jobs, representing members' interests. If labor has won extraordinary gains, management is to blame for not providing sufficient checks and balances, they say.
And if there are inefficiencies in the system, the problem typically is lousy leadership, a lack of resources or an ineffective governance system, union officials say.
"I think it's poor management," said Russell Okata, executive director of the Hawaii Government Employees Association, the largest public sector union in the state. Okata said government should put more effort into hiring managers who not only can motivate workers but who have the political courage to make tough choices.
Even former and current managers acknowledge that the bureaucracy at times can frustrate the best of them, making the path of least resistance tempting.
"One becomes tired of trying to rid the (department) of those who are dragging it down," said Jack Lewin, former Health Department director under Gov. John Waihee and now chief executive of the California Medical Association.
Who's the real culprit?
To some observers, the blame lies with neither management nor labor. "This is not an issue where there are villains," said Bob Fishman, who was Honolulu's managing director until May.They instead point to what they consider an archaic labor-management system, one created nearly 30 years ago. It's a system, for instance, that prohibits the counties from negotiating their own union contracts. The counties must abide by statewide agreements, even if their financial conditions and needs are different from those of the state or other counties.
Another commonly cited culprit: a pay scale that is not linked to performance. Because salaries are based on seniority, the best workers get paid no more than the laziest ones with the same job experience.
"The focus should not be on how to protect mediocre people," said Christel Yount, a Radford High School teacher. "The focus should be on how to encourage excellence."
That's not to say all public-sector workers are mediocre and lazy, former and current managers say. On the contrary, they say, the vast majority are hard-working and industrious.
But the minority of underachievers tends to have a disproportionate affect on the rest of the staff, some workers and managers say. When productive workers see slouches getting the same pay for doing much less, morale can suffer.
"It demoralizes the majority and brings the entire performance level down significantly," Lewin said.
Bureaucratic problems
In a system that doesn't reward efficiency, practices that are clearly inefficient can persist for years.Consider:
Many public school teachers still record student attendance manually on individual index cards while those same students are learning how computers make people's lives more efficient.
Economist Paul Brewbaker said one form he has repeatedly filled out asks for something that never changes: his ethnic background.
Making changes to fix problems in a large bureaucracy isn't easy.
If proposed changes affect working conditions, the unions must be part of the decision- making process.
And if the unions oppose the changes, challenges can be filed, dragging out the process.
"If you're a union leader you can stall something to the point where you effectively negate it," Fishman said.
Even changes in areas not specifically covered by the contracts can be contested.
In the case involving the Big Island water department workers, UPW filed a grievance after the county told the employees, who monitor pump stations and wells, they could no longer take home their assigned government trucks.
For years, management permitted them to drive the vehicles home after work, even though the practice was not referred to in the contract or negotiated with the union.
But an arbitrator ruled the long-standing practice had evolved into "an economic benefit recognized and anticipated by the employees" and, as a work condition, could not be unilaterally ended by the county. To settle the case, the county began reimbursing the workers for driving their own vehicles to and from work.
If the county wanted to eliminate such a benefit, another arbitrator ruled, it must negotiate that at the bargaining table -- a process that would involve the other counties, the state and UPW.
Big Island Mayor Stephen Yamashiro said the case illustrates the difficulties management faces in trying to make changes. Other arbitration, court and labor board rulings have further handicapped management by greatly expanding the scope of what must be negotiated, Yamashiro and others said.
"It utterly cripples us," Yamashiro said.
Tremendous red tape
John Radcliffe, associate executive director of the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly, the UH faculty union, said government managers want the right to take action unilaterally and for workers to "just shut up about it."The expansion of what is bargainable, however, has made the system fairer to workers, giving them a greater say in the workplace, Radcliffe said. "There's a relative balance now."
Like other government managers, Yamashiro also complained about civil service job classifications that they say add tremendous red tape to transferring workers or hiring new ones.
The classifications can be so narrow that the city of Honolulu has more than 1,000 for only 9,000-plus workers -- or one for every nine employees.
The problem several years ago prevented Felix Limtiaco, then the city's wastewater director, from assigning a technical person to a computer control room to monitor the sophisticated alarm system for the underground sewage network.
When an alarm went off one night, the clerk monitoring the system didn't respond appropriately, and a sewage spill subsequently occurred, Limtiaco said. The civil service guidelines only permitted clerks to monitor the system; that was changed after the spill, Limtiaco said.
It is stories like that one that convinced some state legislators to push for sweeping reforms of the collective bargaining and civil service systems last session.
House majority Democrats introduced a reform bill that, among other things, would have provided more flexibility for performance-based pay and would have limited the scope of negotiable issues. But the bill died, partly because of opposition from public-sector unions.
Looking at reforms
Other bills designed to reform the system were introduced in 1996 by Gov. Ben Cayetano's administration. They met similar fates."We didn't get anywhere," said James Takushi, Caye- tano's human resources director. "It was very frustrating."
Some public-sector unions actually support reform of part of the system.
The Hawaii State Teachers Association, for instance, already has agreed with the state on the framework for performance-based pay for senior teachers. But details and funding -- a major obstacle -- still must be negotiated.
Okata said he favors merit pay if the system is fair. "Unfortunately, I haven't stumbled across that magic formula."
Limtiaco said a pay-for-performance system is key. "That has to be one of the cornerstones of becoming more efficient in government," he said.
Other factors commonly mentioned: more training so workers can learn to do more with less and more recognition.
Whatever shortcomings the collective bargaining and civil service systems have, government managers say they still are able to wring efficiencies from the bureaucracy.
Among examples cited:
The processing time for building permits has been chopped significantly. State worker's compensation costs have plunged. Business registration forms have been consolidated.
"That's the kind of thing that isn't publicized," Takushi said. "People have already painted the picture of how bad government is."
Robbie Alm, a First Hawaiian Bank executive who was commerce director under Waihee, said effective leadership is critical to improving efficiency.
"It comes down more to people and management than operating rules," he said. Blaming the unions "is more scapegoating than real answers."
Paul Kobayashi, a Wahiawa school principal who has spent 40-plus years working in the education system, said the unions have been instrumental in improving working conditions and efficiency.
"I don't feel my professional responsibility to the kids has been jeopardized or compromised in any way by collective bargaining," he said.
