Government Workers and Lack of Accountability
Posted: Monday, June 16, 2008
by Missing Link
So I am writing some evaluations of two programs; this means that I collect data and I analyze it and I write about what it says about the program it's from. I try to decide what's going right and what's going wrong and make recommendations for improvement.
These evaluations are for a government agency and were due today. The amazing thing was that the government contact didn't give me all the data they were supposed to give me. It was especially annoying given that I gave them a spreadsheet to fill in, about eight months ago. It was a clever little spreadsheet with rows and columns and various labeled sheets. It even had shading and each data item had its one special place. But no, alas, the government workers ignored my requests to fill in the spreadsheet. They created their own multiple spreadsheets, they filled them incompletely, and with sometimes irrelevant data.
Unions, state or federal contracts, politics, gender equity, racial quotas, weak-kneed administration, easily swayed constituencies, and on and on. All these factors conspire to shield weak government workers from being held accountable. So when a mere external contractor (me, for instance) asks for data to prove that a four year, million dollar plus contract is being fulfilled according to acceptable standards, well, they just don't get too excited.
The fact is that nobody seems too excited about government workers. I ride my bike to a meeting downtown at, say, around 9:00 AM, I can count dozens of state workers walking out on the sidewalk in a leisurely parade to the nearest coffee shop. It's truly a bucolic scene, all these clean cut, well-paid state workers strolling up the shady sidewalk, their little picture Id's fluttering from colorful lanyards sporting enameled pins of all of their favorite causes: Save the Earth, Save the Whales, whatever
Talk about lack of accountability; don't get me started on prevailing wage laws. Is California the only state with a prevailing wage law? Do Californians even know about this? It means that any agency of any government must pay a pre-set wage for certain jobs over a certain dollar amount. It is the ultimate in lack of accountability. Everyone has to pay the same wages regardless of whether they can afford it or if the contractor is worth the top wage level. It means that a small rural town in northern California has to pay construction workers the same hourly wage as construction workers are paid in San Francisco. That means that many things can't get done because it simply costs too much. The tax base is much lower in Podunk, California than in San Francisco. The average 120k house doesn't generate as much revenue as the average 700k house in SF. Unions are run by geniuses, don't you think? They scalp us and nobody even says ouch.
So back to my evaluations, I provided the reports and I met my deadlines. These reports are of course less thorough than they might be given the tardiness and inadequacy of the data. The people at the agency won't understand that one of them is doing a crap job and the other one is doing a great job because neither of them gave be sufficient time or data to write an evaluation that adequately shows what they are doing. The sad thing is that it doesn't matter because nobody at the agency is going to know the difference anyway. It could be they're smart enough to understand the data, it could be they are not smart enough to understand it, but the fact is government workers are smart enough to understand is that nobody above them cares. I can tell you where the state workers will be tomorrow, out walking for coffee about an hour after they report to work.
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