Does anybody really believe that anyone can now get hired at City Hall?

I was amused to read an Associated Press account about the fact that a federal judge lifted a series of restrictions meant to ensure that government jobs weren’t given out purely as rewards for political work.

Who you know may not be enough to land a job at Chicago's City Hall anymore -- that was the story's lede. Do you really believe this to be true?

EXCUSE ME FOR being skeptical, but there’s always going to be a degree to which people hire those with whom they are most comfortable, and to whom each election cycle will mean the coming of new blood – largely because the old blood will have lost their political sponsors in the electoral posts.

Besides, we do have to admit that much of the old, incredibly blatant, ways of government hiring have gone by the wayside. A new generation that just isn’t inclined to be so obedient just to get a job has come in.

Personally, I view the lifting of Shakman Decree restrictions as being merely an acknowledgement of that fact. The blatant problems are over. But the more subtle ones are not, and likely never will be.

What we have to be less concerned with is less about who “sent” someone for a particular post, and more about whether government work (“the people’s business,” as some cynical pols refer to it), actually gets done.

BECAUSE MUCH OF the work done in these clerical jobs is stuff that could be done by many people – including the ones who got the jobs because they happened to know somebody.

There are times I wonder if the people who complain the loudest are the ones who are jealous that the only people they know capable of “getting them” a job are ones who work in a gas station, and not some sort of pseudo-cushy political posts.

If they had the right contacts, they’d suddenly be all for the old system.

And yes, I have to tell you that many of these jobs can be mind-numbing in their own right. If not for the perspective that you’re doing work for the public, nobody would want many of these clerical posts.

BECAUSE ANYBODY WITH any real intelligence who works within government either has some sort of serious dedication to the public good (more intense than you’d see in a police officer or social worker), or else they wind up leaving to make much more money in the private sector.

Now I suppose I should say that I once got a government job because of who I knew. It was back when I was in college and I needed a job for the summer. It turned out I knew someone who knew then-Rich Township Democratic Committeeman Lee Conlon.

It also turned out that Conlon and I had both attended the same university. So the next thing I knew, I was showing up at the office of then-Cook County Assessor Harold “Bus” Yourell, whose chief of staff had but one question for me.

 

Literally, it was “Who sent you?” That was my only qualification for a summer’s worth of work in the basement recording land transactions in giant ledger books (the county hadn’t yet fully computerized such information, so the books still had to be kept up to date).

I CAN’T SAY any of my colleagues were particularly qualified for the job. Then again, I don’t think anyone out there would have done any better than we did that summer.

Even if I was, theoretically, just a political hack who was eminently replaceable.

Do we really want a government operated by somebody, even if they have no real qualifications or skills, that anybody sent?

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No political hiring in Cook County Govt?

I’m sure that soon-to-be-former Cook County Board President Todd Stroger and his minions will dig out that old cliché about “comparing apples to oranges” to criticize me for the following commentary.

But I couldn’t help but snicker at reading the news reports Friday that said Stroger had 157 violations of the rules that currently prevent government hiring based on political criteria.

BECAUSE I STILL remember vividly a moment that occurred at a Cook County Board meeting almost a year ago to the date, when Stroger self-righteously insisted that there was no political hiring within county government under his watch.

Of course, nobody believed it back when he said it. So we’re not shocked now to learn that Michael Shakman, the man whose life (and name) has been devoted to the idea of undermining the concept of “we don’t want nobody nobody sent,” is saying under oath in open court that there have been 13 dozen (plus one) violations of the law.

So who’s right? It seems like it is a very technical question that the courts are going to resolve.

Because attorneys for Stroger, including the daughter of one-time Cook County Commissioner Ted Lechowicz, says that none of the hires involved in this case are true violations of rules against politically motivated hiring.

THERE IS A degree to which an elected official should be able to have certain positions filled with people whose political loyalty is toward himself (or herself, depending on the official’s gender).

Laura Lechowicz Felicione argued in court this week that these 157 people are in positions that should fall under such a category, but that officials are still in the process of finishing work on a list of exactly which jobs can be filled for political reasons.

“I don’t think we have violated the ban,” she told the Chicago Tribune. Which means this is about technicalities.

For the record, the compliance administrator who is heading a team of people that is supposed to be working out all those technicalities said the problem is that county officials, including Stroger, don’t seem to be in any hurry to finish the list – which makes the situation deliberately vague.

OF COURSE, IT was this same administrator who, when she said last year that it was possible for systems to be “manipulated” so that one could not definitively say which county employees were political hires and which were truly legitimate workers who benefitted the public, got Stroger to make his snippy little remarks – which included his utterly-laughable claim that, “we (the county) don’t use clout in” human resources.

Which makes the bottom line on this issue one that we will have many more years of litigation. It also probably means a reality that we will never be able to fully eliminate the idea that someone got a job on a government payroll because of who they knew.

Now I know that reality will offend some people who want to think we can have an ideal world where everybody who bothers to work on a public payroll does so out of a sense of wanting to do “the people’s business” instead of trying – first and foremost – to earn a living for themselves.

It is just that I can comprehend why someone who gets elected to office wouldn’t want to have huge amounts of people doing the actual scut work of implementing his/her policies into practice who don’t necessarily agree – and might even think they are there to undermine “the boss.”

CONSIDERING ALSO THAT I once held a job while still in college working on the Cook County payroll (the summer of 1986, with the Recorder of Deeds office, because I knew someone who knew then-Rich Township Democratic Committeeman Lee Conlon), I can understand that connections don’t always work in sordid ways.

If anything, one of the factors I always take into account whether considering a candidate for my vote is to figure what kind of people he/she would bring along with them – assuming they were to win office and start using the perks of having control over jobs.

Candidates who seem to attract lazy slugs who are only interested in a government job because they think they won’t have to actually work are the ones who have trouble getting my vote.

Those candidates who manage to put a batch of their friends on the government payroll (which there is ample evidence that Stroger has done) are the ones who create an issue that their opponents can use against them.

WHICH MEANS THAT while I understand why people who are among Shakman’s biggest supporters get worked up over the thought of political hiring, I have my own troubles with the concept of restricting it largely for the same reason why I think those people who go about screaming “term limits!” are not thinking the issue through.

One of the reasons why Stroger came in fourth in a four-way Democratic primary despite having all the familial advantages that should have made him a government official-for-life is that voters thought he overdid the political hiring thing.

He lost. That is the ultimate punishment for a politician, moreso than any sanctions a court might impose.

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