The King Grew Vain;

Fought all his battles o'er again;
And thrice he routed all his foes;
And thrice he slew the slain.

-- From "Alexander's Feast" by John Dryden

Da Mare's got that wild privatization hair up his ass again...

From the Sun Times:

Daley has new plan to outsource some city hiring
Mayor also says corporations will be able to sponsor, decorate bridgehouses

June 24, 2010

By FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

Mayor Daley revived his failed plan today to outsource city hiring to cut costs and restore public confidence shaken by the hiring scandal that culminated in the conviction of his former patronage chief.

The latest example of Daley's privatization frenzy will start with a request-for-proposals from firms interested in recruiting and hiring tradespeople in five city departments: Streets and Sanitation, Transportation, Water Management, Aviation and General Services.

If it works to have an outside personnel firm recruit and hire carpenters, electricians, laborers and plumbers, City Hall will move to outsource all other hiring, the mayor said.

Private firms will still be required to abide by the city hiring plan tied to the long-running Shakman case. And Inspector General Joe Ferguson will retain oversight over city hiring.

“I'm determined that we get our hiring procedures correct. The people of Chicago need to have confidence in all the procedures and know they have the same fair chance of getting a city job,” Daley said.

The mayor noted that the city spends an “enormous amount of time” wading through the mountain of applications for each job.

“Especially today . . . If you put one position on line, you get 5,000 applicants. We don't have the expertise. Let's get out of this,” he said.

“Let the private sector do it. They have better technology, a better way of doing it. Why should we just sit there. I'm just telling you — it's mind-boggling.”
...

Ald. Joe Moore (49th) said he's “not a big fan of privatization,” especially after the parking meter fiasco.

But he said: “Because the mayor has thoroughly failed to manage hiring in a legal fashion, he has no choice. He just received another scathing review by the inspector general on contracts. The monitor has continued to find fault with the mayor on his hiring. It's clear he's just not capable of managing certain aspects of the city.”

Here are a couple of fun facts that didn't make it into print that made me smile when I read this latest example of Daley getting his privatization freak on.

First, screening people for skill-specific jobs like swinging a hammer or driving a forklift or pouring concrete is just not that hard. 

Second, Da Mare already spends an enormous amount of your tax money to run a system that does exactly this: a fact that he seems oblivious to, despite pictures like this, showing him standing next to a Commissioner -- who he pays handsomely to run this system -- at the grand opening of one of the many, many locations across the city where these activities are considered pretty routine and take place six days a week, rain or shine.

These are the same activities that Da Mare characterizes as "mind-boggling", leading me to think that perhaps the poor man doesn't really know what that word means, or that maybe the people who would profit directly from his obsession with Outsourcery are playing on his bias and ignorance, and lying to him about degrees of difficulty.

To be sure, like all human enterprises, parts of the system are run badly.  Very badly, about which much More later.  But the point is that the City of Chicago already maintains dozens of job/workforce centers -- one in almost every neighborhood or ward -- that just so happen to specialize in screening tens of thousands of people who are looking for work and match them up with hundreds of different kinds of job openings.

As they have done for decades.

And it also just so happens that, as federal stimulus money runs out and federal funding for this very system gets cut and cut and cut (sure, during the worst recession in 70 years it's spectacularly stupid and shortsighted to slash the hell out of one of the few social services which is specifically chartered to help unemployed and underemployed Chicagoans find work or find training that can lead to work, but no one ever said that the men and women who rule the City of Chicago are especially bright or far-sighted), that system is shedding  hundreds of experts in exactly the kind of sifting and sorting Hizzoner believes his own Human Resources department to be completely incompetent to handle: namely evaluating applicants and rating their fitness to fill available jobs.

Seems like a perfect fit, right? Directly under Hizzoner's nose there's already this army of seasoned professionals spread out all over the City housed in buildings with the Daley Family Name plastered all over them -- on the verge of losing their jobs for lack of funding -- with the expertise to deliver exactly the kind of services Daley says he needs.

In addition to the human expertise already being available in-house, the same, shiny, whiz-bang Private Sector technologies that impresses the heck out of people like Da Mare (who believe Technology is Magic) is also already up and running within Hizzoner's vast empire, having been funded either on the City's own dime or through systems that the State of Illinois has deployed state-wide and is in use -- today -- at various city colleges, one stops and employment offices.

So if  the professionals are already teed up and ready to go, and the tools already bought and sharpened and waiting, what the hell is really going on with this bullshit about the task being too "mind-boggling" for mere mortals who work for the City to handle?  And since this first piece is being sold as an experiment to see whether or not a private company can handle the "mind-boggling" horror of hiring "carpenters, electricians, laborers and plumbers" why not hand a chunk of it over to people you are already paying to do exactly that job and let them demonstrate that they can handle the weight just as well as ManPower or Spherion?

Politics and Ideology.

First, let's face it, the days when a Chicago mayor could exploit the vast majority of city workers as foot-soldiers in his private, political army are have long since entered their twilight. Now city workers are mostly just...workers...whose continued existence forces Da Mayor to divert increasingly large percentages of increasingly scarce City dollars away from the pockets of his cronies and contributors favorite private sector superheroes and into "salaries" and "benefits" which those greedy employees use to support their "families" and "communities".

So fuck 'em.

Second, many of the people who run the huge, Byzantine Rube Goldberg contraption known as Family and Support Services view their jobs as delivering welfare programs to the poor, the homeless, the disabled, ex-convicts, etc. Important work to be sure, but when it comes to getting people into jobs, the welfare culture prevails. And so even though the skill sets are the same, it would not necessarily occur to people who see themselves primarily as social workers to market themselves to City Hall as a recruiting firm.

Third, and most important, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if it just never occurred to Hizzoner to find out whether or not any of his own people outside of the Human Resources cesspit were up to the job, because on any given day his attitude towards the city workers generally seems to veer between contempt and indifference.

This is because, all his life, Daley has spent most of his quality time in the company of the wealthy and powerful.

In fact, to understand Da Mare, you have to set aside traditional ideas about how Democrats and Republicans line up and understand that the other famous politician whose life most parallels Daley's own is  George W. Bush; a man who Da Mare always admired.

Both men were born to power and privileged. Both were the none-too-bright sons of powerful fathers, whose jobs they would later take over. Both have much smarter brothers who they have overshadowed. Both have an estranged relationship with the King's English. Both have learned to play the populist when the political winds demanded it. Both succeeded by running against the Evils of Gummint, at a time when they were the single most powerful player in that gummint. Both have a complete disregard for the limits of executive power. Both are very shrewd politicians who play for keeps. Both treat(ed) the legislative branches of their respective governments with contempt.

Each has the soul of a monarch, and surrounds himself with flatterers and yes-men.

And so -- despite multiple, ruinous rebuttals stretching out in every direction as far as the eye can see -- as a result of the confluence of his particular Nature and Nurture, Da Mare believes as an article of faith that there there is nothing in the world that gummint can do that the private sector cannot do better/faster/cheaper.

As long as he controls the purse-strings.