Terminated: The Sequel

Your halo will not save you.

From our local ABC affiliate:

City of Chicago threatening layoffs

Friday, June 05, 2009
By Ben Bradley

June 5, 2009 (CHICAGO) (WLS) -- Union leaders now say they expect the City of Chicago will send lay-off notices to as many as 1,100 workers.

However, they're holding out hope that a deal can be reached before the job cuts take effect later this summer. The city is trying to close a $250 million budget deficit and is asking union workers to make concessions.

No one quarrels with the fact the city's budget along with the rest of the economy is hurting. The debate is about how to fix it. Union workers made concessions six months ago. Now they're asking why they have to do it again.

"Nobody wants to get laid off. Nobody wants to go home on unemployment," said Tom Morris, Chicago Water Department employee.

Chicago Water Department workers Tom Morris and Patrick McDonough are keenly aware of the city's budget problems and aren't shy about saying who they think is to blame.

"Every city worker watches Mayor Daley taking trips all over the world. He's not here. He should have been addressing these problems a long time ago, and last minute he wants to take it out on the backs of city workers," said Patrick McDonough, Chicago Water Department employee.

…

As a result, City Hall says as many as 1,100 people may need to be laid off, unless city workers agree to take 16 unpaid days off and adjust overtime costs.
...

I can’t tell you a thing about the specifics behind whatever Rube Goldberg decision-matrix the City has cobbled together this time to calculate who'll get voted off Daley Island and who will not in the latest round of “Survivor: Chicago”. These are, for now, mostly union jobs they’re talking about. And with them, well, suffice it to say, the City probably started out with one list, which, by the end of a brutal week of bumping and calling in favors, reclassifying and seniority invoking, will have become a whole 'nother list.

But based on the god-awful “Paths of Glory”-style clusterfuck


the last series of City-wide layoffs


devolved into

(Hell, just rent the movie)

your humble scrivener can make some reasonably intelligent guesses as to the state of mind of many of the men and women (some of whom, I should add in the interest of disclosure, I count as friends of mine) who are again under the gun.

Consider that they were all ringside witnesses to exactly how the City conducted itself just six short months under virtually identical circumstances. And having watched friends and colleagues losing or keeping their jobs with no intelligible rhyme or reason -- having learned up close and nasty exactly how the system works -- they now sit inside the Dark Tower, professionally stranded and becalmed like the doomed crew from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

waiting for the word to come down.

These are people who have been emotionally mangled and fundamentally changed from whoever they might have been just a few years ago.

You see, once upon a time (about a thousand years ago when he was ramrodding Da Mare’s city,) then-Chief of Staff Ron Huberman was known to blow in occasional, “Attaboy” calls to the burners of the midnight oil. It was a nice thing to do, this little “Thank You” to those who came in early and left long after dark. It was also a smart thing to do, because those are the very people who keep the City humming; those many hundreds of men and women who simply

Work.

Their.

Asses.

Off.

These are the people you will rarely hear about; the ones who are salaried in a system where there is no such thing as profit, so they can forget about overtime (And bonuses? Are you fucking kidding me?) for working themselves into an ulcer. But they do it anyway, believe it or not usually for the simple reason that the lives and futures of their fellow citizens depend on the work getting done.

Did you know you had people like that working for you? People who know how their day is gonna go based on what scandal is unfolding in the Sun Times that morning, and who are furious every time another unscrupulous mope gets caught ripping off the public because it makes their hard jobs that much harder?

Let me tell you, there are people on the public dime who work in the public interest as passionately as a hedge-fund manager works for his millions. People who work nights. Weekends. Holidays. Who work the phone while taking a piss. Who lug home fat briefcases stuffed with files marked “Urgent!”, and then hustle back in the wee small hours because they’ve been told to sit in on another “Very Urgent!” meeting that, six-to-five, will probably end up being canceled.

And why do they find themselves working harder and harder for what amounts to less and less?

Because somebody had to take up the slack from the last batch of layoffs. And from the last round of reorganizations. From the last wave of people who left and were never replaced. From the last bunch of “early retirements”.

Because somebody had to prop up privatization experiments that outsourced all the easy, profitable shit...but left behind a farrago of hard, ugly heavy-lifting.

Because somebody had to make good on the latest brace of wild, “Of course we’ll pick up the fucking building and move it three feet to the left, Mr. Mare!” promises that have been tossed onto their backs by truckling bosses trying to save their own jobs.

Because somebody had to make up for all the work being paid for but not being done by the protected-from-on-high-by-the-Prince-of-Darkness goof who lazes his days away three cubicles down.

Times are tough and everybody knows it, but when experts advise that the best thing an employee can do is to build themselves a “halo” (from Google News) --

For many workers, fear of layoff is big motivator

By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD

Her job description says Madeline Adams is a social worker. But lately she's begun volunteering for tasks she never had before at the St. Louis marriage counseling agency where she works: planning events, ordering supplies, stocking shelves. She estimates she's put in hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime work.

Adams isn't gunning for a promotion. She just wants to keep her job.

Bosses around the country these days are discovering it's not too much ask for a little extra help around the office. Anything but.

More employees seem to be showing up early, forgoing vacation time, taking on extra projects — and doing it all with a smile (whether real or otherwise).

…

Not all that extra productivity has been voluntary. Some workers are simply forced to do more as co-workers leave, notes Steve Davis, an economist with the American Enterprise Institute.
…

"I've started to see a sea change," Tulgan said. "A growing number of people are saying: 'I've got to roll my sleeves up and do something now.' They're finding ways they can identify problems before they happen."

Some workers are aiming for the "halo effect," said Bernie Sparks, founder of the 21st Century Leadership workplace consulting: When managers decide who goes and who stays, those seen as having a halo over their heads stand a better chance of surviving.
…

-- what do you tell the Left Behind who know that advice is mostly bullshit when you woik for Da City?

How do you motivate those who have already watched colleagues -- whose sleeves had been rolled up practically to their throats years ago -- lose their jobs...

...while the protected goof three cubicles down continues to draw a paycheck?

Again, from Coleridge:

Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.

How can you earn backthe trust of people who are already exhausted and demoralized from furlough after furlough and untold, undocumented months of unpaid overtime, and who have now had their noses rubbed in the bitter reality that, in the final calculus, none of it will matter one fucking iota?

People who -- on top of everything else -- then have to look across the hall and see shit like this:

Entries associated with the tag "aldermanic expenses":
Charge it to my account once more
February 26th

These are tough times, but last summer aldermen successfully fought off the idea of cuts to their expense allowances—accounts worth $73,280 that they can spend on “ordinary and necessary expenses incurred in connection with the performance of an alderman’s official duties,” as the budget ordinance puts it. Before 2008, aldermen were receiving $33,280, a figure that most said was just too low to cover even basic needs like rent, utilities, and office supplies.
...

People who flip on the news and hear Da Mare -- in full-blown, cult-like fetishization of All Things Private Sector mode -- expressing his undisguised contempt for the little people who work for him (From local NBC affiliate, with a little emphasis added by me):

…
On Wednesday, Daley had said, “'They’re not customer-related. They’re gonna leave at 5 o’clock. They’re gonna leave at 4:30 or 4:00. I’m sorry. We’re on a time clock. They walk out. But, in the private sector, when you have a customer, you’re gonna stay there making sure they’re happy and satisfied."

Daley's logic, as always, is hard to follow. The mayor is defending leasing or selling city assets such as Midway Airport and its parking meters to private interests because he apparently believes private interests can get more out of those assets by getting more out of their employees. Good for them, if true. But how does that help the city?
…

It's also clear that Daley doesn't understand a private sector in which he's never worked. No clock-watchers there? Take a look around your office right now. Think the mayor is right?

Also, city workers leave their jobs when their shifts are over because . . . their shifts are over. Same with the private sector - at least the unionized part of it. Maybe Daley prefers Wal-Mart's old style of management, which forced employees to work for free off-the-clock.
…

Whaddya mean "maybe"?

And, finally, where did this cavalier disdain for the men and women who keep the “City That Works” working come from?

The short answer is, it’s in water here. In the culture.

Prosecutor: Al Sanchez 'used city jobs as currency'

From the Chicago Breaking News Center:

While he was city Streets and Sanitation commissioner, Al Sanchez sat atop a powerful political organization that traded hundreds of city jobs for campaign work, stripping the legitimacy from Chicago's hiring system, federal prosecutors said today.

In opening remarks to a federal jury at Sanchez's trial, a prosecutor said auditoriums full of applicants seeking city jobs waited for interviews that didn't matter because of the corruption.

"It was a sham from top to bottom," said Assistant U.S. Atty. Steven Grimes.

Sanchez, a leader in the Hispanic Democratic Organization, one of the city's most powerful political groups, is on trial at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse on seven counts of mail fraud stemming from falsified documents sent to job applicants. Aaron Delvalle, Sanchez's right-hand man, is also on trial on charges he lied to a grand jury investigating the hiring fraud.

Grimes described how workers requested positions or promotions, relaying their wishes to HDO coordinators who passed them to Sanchez and Delvalle.

"Mr. Sanchez used city jobs as currency," Grimes said.
…

In a system where individual jobs, organizational units and even whole departments have always been treated as mere beads on a vast, political abacus -- to be added in or taken away depending on the immediate political needs of the moment -- hard work and excellence are at best immaterial and, at worst, are mistrusted and resented.

In good times, this rot at the heart of the system can be papered over by growing revenues.

But in bad times it sticks out as naked and raw as a broken bone, devouring and demoralizing the very people the City most needs to be at their best at its moment of maximum crisis.