A federal court says Mayor Washington can`t fire political hacks if they are his opponents` political hacks. So a good portion of the city payroll is untouchable. Another big chunk is untouchable because of rigid work rules in labor contracts.
Now a group of newly laid-off city employees has come up with yet another excuse to keep Chicago`s payroll fat and bloated.
The 162 garbage crew foremen whose jobs were abolished by the mayor are suing for reinstatement on the ground that the city has enough money to keep paying them because if it doesn`t have enough money it can always get more by raising taxes.
If you think no court or arbitrator could possibly buy that argument, ponder the series of Shakman decisions that ban firing, demoting and otherwise inconveniencing public employees if a whiff of politics is detectable.
Mr. Washington`s attempts to cut Chicago`s work force already have produced a horde of lawsuits under the Shakman label. Sometimes the mayor wins and sometimes he doesn`t, but one thing is always certain: Defending these suits eats up lots of tax dollars. The new rounds of layoffs ordered by Mr. Washington this spring are the most extensive since he canceled the 11th-hour hires that Mayor Byrne piled onto the payroll during her last days in office. No doubt this suit by Local 1001 of the County Municipal Employees Supervisors and Foremen is just the first of a batch of costly new court fights and arbitration cases.
It would be hard for the foremen to argue that they are needed. City garbage crews follow the same routes week after week, month after month, year after year. If changes are needed, the ward superintendents make them. The foremen were an unnecessary supervisory layer, in some cases at the ridiculous ratio of one foreman for every two or three crews. A management study commissioned four years ago by Mayor Byrne concluded that Chicago`s Department of Streets and Sanitation had far too many supervisory personnel and that it shouldn`t have taken this long to start eliminating them.
The union`s contention that the layoffs are illegal because the city has enough money to keep the foremen on the job is equally absurd. The Washington administration was socked with about $110 million in extra labor costs this year, much of it in back pay increases. It also lost about $20 million in federal aid and will lose another $47 million next year. Most of this budget gap will be closed with tax increases. For the rest, the mayor plans to eliminate about 1,200 jobs, or 3 percent of the city`s work force. If anything, that is too slight a bite in a payroll that for decades has been too big and too costly.
Many of the newly fired people are supporting families and after years of working for the city will have a hard time finding other jobs. The layoffs will be devastating for them. But a government cannot keep superfluous workers simply because it`s the kind thing to do. Chicago`s fiscal soundness is at stake, and that must take precedence over the personal hardships of its laid- off employees.
