Let the Neck Stabbin' Begin!

An early taste of the Way of Rahmses?

From The Washington Post:

Top USDA official, leaving to work for Rahm Emanuel, accused of discrimination
By Ed O'Keefe

The Agriculture Department’s outgoing communications director — leaving Friday to serve as Chicago Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel’s spokeswoman — and her top aides have faced at least nine federal personnel complaints, according to documents and interviews with current and former USDA employees. The allegations include age and gender discrimination and the promotion of employees supportive of the Democratic Party.

Chris Mather, a former spokeswoman for Jill Biden during the 2008 Obama-Biden presidential campaign, has been USDA’s communications director since 2009. She has worked for legal and women’s groups in Chicago and announced April 5 that she is returning to the city to work for Emanuel, who takes office in mid-May.

Mather, Deputy Communications Director David Black, Deputy Director of Operations Justin DeJong and other top officials in the department’s communications office faced at least nine formal equal employment opportunity complaints filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. The workers said they raised the allegations “because of a hostile work environment, retaliation and/or prohibited personnel practice,” according to a letter sent to lawmakers in January.

“This is very serious and never in our entire careers have we encountered such egregious, mean and poor management,” the letter said.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said late Thursday that two of the complaints have been dismissed, two were settled and five remain under investigation.

“If there’s a determination of wrongdoing we’ll deal with it, as we should,” Vilsack said in an interview.

Mather’s management style “is equated more to a dictatorship than that of a relationship built upon mutual trust and respect between employees and their managers,” the current and former employees wrote in their letter.

Marci Hilt, who worked in the agency’s public affairs office for 43 years, said she signed the letter with seven former colleagues because Mather is “the most unprofessional political appointee I’d ever worked with.”

“She would go up and down people like a buzzsaw” and yell at them in daily staff meetings, Hilt, now retired, said in an interview Thursday. Hilt also said that Mather “wanted the political appointees talking to reporters” instead of having career staffers, who knew the subject matter, talking to the reporters they knew who cover USDA.

The letter’s signatories said they have more than 150 years of combined federal service. Six current employees also agreed with the criticisms listed in the letter but declined to be identified for fear of reprisal. Three of the employees said they had tried to address the concerns with USDA officials. All of them said Mather’s impending departure isn’t expected to improve morale.

According to the letter, employees selected for promotion in the past two years “are all under 30 years old and/or come with backgrounds or beliefs that support the policies of the Democratic Party.”
...

Man, I'm so old that I remember when people applying for work in the new Obama Administration were required to fill out a long, long form in which they had to completely turn out their personal and professional pockets and any fleck of lint in any email or online comment you ever made that might in any way embarrass the White House could be a disqualifier.

But of course, as was foretold in the Eighth Lesson of Rahmses (Employee Morale) things in the Real World work very differently:

Neck-stab half the fuckin' staff and throw 'em the fuck out with the trash.

Doesn't matter which half: the ones you neck-stab stop being a problem; the ones you spare will be so grateful you didn't neck-stab 'em that you can work 'em until they drop in their traces.

Anybody has a problem with that, they can fuckin' quit and go sell irregular tube socks on an I-94 on-ramp, 'cause they'll never work a real job in my fuckin' city ever again.

So let it be written. So let it be fuckin' done.

...


[Because] with all the grim news raining down in from every direction, what transforms the situation from merely Very Bad into Utterly Toxic is when city workers look around them and see that, even as the City cries poormouth and demands ever more work for ever less pay -- hard work, long hours, creativity and competence still have nothing whatsoever to do with who gets the axe and who does not.

That no matter what City Hall public information machine says about drowning in red ink and the desperate need for everyone to pull together for the common good, there is still a fucking club,

and they sure as Hell still ain't in it.

I guess Ron Huberman wasn't available (From "The Beachwood Reporter" riffing off of a "speaking fluff to power" article in "Chicago" magazine):

Huberman, in fact, became Daley's chief of staff in the aftermath of the Hired Truck scandal, ostensibly with the mandate to, you know, clean things up. Who hired Angelo Torres, Ron? Apparently unasked and certainly unanswered.
...

Finally:

"Though Huberman had barely spent time in the private sector, he developed a reputation as a brutal, corporate-style executive."

Reporters love this in everyone's workplace but their own. Being a brutal, corporate-style executive is always sure to gain you points in a profile.

"None of the critics or victims of Huberman's sometimes-brusque style would speak on the record for fear of angering a powerful man who has the mayor's ear."

Managing by fear is a sign of weakness, even incompetence. But it stifles critics who might otherwise stifle a glowing profile.

Chicago would have done its readers a much bigger favor if it had done what Joravsky did: Read the budget.
...

These are, of course, still early days, and Rahm is still Mayor-Elect -- still dewy with the promise of a kinder, gentler municipal government.

Still, if past performance is any measure of future behavior (And what performance management wonk would ever argue that it is not?) it's never to early to test drive a new Phrase that Pays.

Something like:

One Rahm to rule them all,
One Rahm to find them,
One Rahm to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

Or, as the French say:

Plus ca change,
Plus c'est la meme Clout