Personnel Policy in the City

As a result of the University of California's Oakland Project, Oakland now enjoys a fourth claim to -fame-after Jack London, the Hell's Angels, and Charley Finley-the honor of having, on a per capita basis, the most studied city government in the world. As one of several analyses of urban administration resulting from the Oakland Project, this book intensively "explores how officials deal with the politics of jobs" in a medium-sized, council-manager, central city. The author's thesis is that the administration of the municipal personnel function is much more a political than a technical process, and he gives us seven chapters' worth of description and analysis of the processes by which positions are created and classified, people are recruited and hired, pay rates are set, and employees are removed. He focusses on the primary actors involved, which in Oakland during the late sixties and early seventies were the city manager (by far the key actor), the various department heads, the city employee unions, the relevant specialist organizational units (chiefly the personnel department and the civil service commission), the elected officials, and citizen interest groups. The book contains several themes, which the author skillfully blends together. First and most important, the actors' interest in, responsibility for, and influence or leverage over various issues are widely dispersed. The city manager, for example, can simply veto his department heads' never-ceasing requests for more positions; he cannot, however, exercise the same control over the unions in collective bargaining, which means that the bargaining outcomes are more uncertain; and he may uphold an employee discharge (initially made by a department head) only to see his decision overturned by the civil service commission or the courts. Similarly, department heads seem to have little control over the recruitment, selection, classification, and rewarding of their employees. While this dispersion of authority may hinder efficiency (e.g., an incompetent employee may be reinstated and meritorious performance not rewarded), it may also be useful when the actors want to avoid making decisions: witness the buck-passing responses of city officials to minority interest groups pressuring for increased minority hiring. In general, the city manager wants to keep costs down, the department heads want to build larger empires, the unions want the keys to the city treasury, citizen interest groups want specific changes to serve their particular interests, employees want security and higherrated jobs, and Thompson presents a wealth of detail about how the various actors influence other actors in the pursuit of their objectives. Second, the actors frequently make personnel decisions in a substantial information vacuum. For instance, nobody in city hall really knows: if the selection criteria are directly related to job performance; what excellent performance is in most city jobs, let alone how to measure it; if there is a direct connection between the number of police officers and the reported crime rate; if all 3500 city employees are accurately classified; and so on. Third, the standard prescriptions about public personnel policies and procedures ("use validated selection methods," "provide equal pay for equal work," etc.) tend to be overlooked because of the organizational realities in which personnel decisions are made. As Thompson notes, the costs involved in meeting the prescriptive literature's requirements usually are prohibitive; so the prescriptions essentially are useless to practitioners (and I suspect the same could be said of the private sector). These prohibitive costs also mean that the personnel information vacuum will continue. This book is a case study, and therein lie both its greatest strength and weakness. Its long suit is the intensiveness of detail presented about the actors' interactions over a variety of specific issues. We learn, for example: how a part-time recreation employee discharged for being a "druggie" got himself reinstated by mobilizing the support of a neighborhood newspaper and the citizenry in the neighborhood where he worked; how the police union convinced a