Well, here we go again. In both Canada and the U.S., certain political factions are continuing to treat public servants as “costs” rather than as “assets”. They believe that all one has to do to get deficits under control and to balance budgets is cut public service jobs and freeze public servants’ wages. Even better, let’s just make the public service operate more like private corporations — a crazy notion that I previously had blogged on.
However, the fact of the matter is that many of government’s human resource problems have arisen from changes in the nature of the public sector workforces and a lack of political will. While clerical jobs once dominated the bureaucracy, professional occupations do today. Governments need to recruit and keep employees to fill those posts. Current job classification systems prevent agencies from aligning compensation with what comparable occupations in the private sector pay, undermining government’s ability to attract top performers. Political motivated attacks on the public service only help to increase what have already become stressful working conditions. This in turn has increased concerns over the mental health of senior managers and public sector employees, and subsequent lost of productivity.
Cuts in operating budgets of various departments/agencies often lead to program and service delivery becoming “dysfunctional”, no longer able to effectively serve their respective clients. Since this primarily is a consequence of token cuts, one has to ask oneself why a government would continue to support the existence of reduced programs and services. Maybe it’s time that politicians bite the bullet and make some hard choices. Governments need to do their evaluations and eliminate programs and services that they believe are no longer essential. There will no doubt be an outcry by affected interest groups, including unions, and various supporters of such programs. However, governments will just have to have the political will and stamina to face such opposition, something that hasn’t been too much in evidence in the past.
Moreover, governments will no longer be asking public servants to do more with less and to undertake the near impossible. While such program elimination will result in a “leaner and meaner” public service, it will also lead to ensuring adequate resources and support are provided to ensure the effectiveness of the essential programs and services. After all, is it not the role of government to make the hard choices? Once done, politicians must stop simply attacking public servants, get on with modernizing the public service to meet its future challenges, reduce unnecessary contracting out of services, and improve government’s ability to attract top performers.
FROLITICKS 