Civil Service proposal hit
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Proposed changes in state Civil Service would end state employee job protections and return Louisiana to a spoils system where people are politically hired and fired, state employees and their representatives complained Wednesday.
A parade of people appeared before the State Civil Service Commission — the body constitutionally charged with approving rules governing state employment practices — to protest changes to employee layoff procedures.
At the heart of the opposition is a proposed end to “bumping rights,” which generally protect senior employees from layoffs. The proposed rules would use job performance ratings in determining who goes and who stays — a move that could inject politics into decision-making, employees said.
The commission heard testimony for more than an hour at the beginning of its regularly scheduled meeting.
The commission is scheduled to vote on the proposed changes at a June 3 public hearing. The rules affect layoff procedures for some 60,000 state employees.
The Civil Service agency staff is recommending the changes in preparation for potential job layoffs and state government reorganization that may be required because of a state revenue decline and the loss of federal stimulus dollars down the road, Civil Service director Anne Soileau said. The idea is to make it easier for agencies to adjust and keep the employees needed to do required jobs regardless of their state service time, she said.
But opponents said the agency was abandoning state employees and acquiescing to the wishes of politicians who want to make state employees the fall guys for the economic ills of the state.
Louisiana State Penitentiary Warden Burl Cain — the state employee representative on the commission — advised state employees to become “proactive” in the wake of the assault on their jobs.
“You better come out from under the house yourselves and you better go to calling your legislators and you better not just let this happen to you,” Cain said.
Today, rank-and-file state employees are “insulated from political favoritism and arbitrary treatment in hiring, firing and discipline. Anything less is a politically based spoils system abandoned decades ago,” said Leonal Hardman, president of the Louisiana Public Employee Council 17.
The system being proposed would allow an individual to be laid off based on “whether or not an individual is liked or not liked,” Hardman testified.
Clyde Martin retired from the state Department of Transportation and Development, then was rehired after the hurricanes.
Martin told the commissioners he could remember when the Civil Service system was adopted to provide job protections no matter who was in office.
“At that time, the deduct system was in effect. Politicians were collecting money for jobs,” Martin said. “Now all of a sudden there’s an emergency here and we’re … changing the rules to fit what the politicians want.”
The Jindal administration and several lawmakers are pushing for similar changes either administratively or through legislation introduced in the current session, part of “government streamlining.”
Baton Rouge lawyer Mark Falcon said appointed officials call the shots on agency personnel matters. Human resource officers would be afraid to step forward to complain if politics is creeping into the layoff process, he said.
The proposed rules would foster “bias, favoritism and lack of objectivity,” said Falcon, who represents employees in personnel matters.
Falcon predicted the new rules will open the door to many employee lawsuits.
Former longtime Civil Service Director Herb Sumrall said about a dozen human resource directors asked him to testify in opposition to the changes because they are “afraid of retribution.”
The scuttling of seniority amounts to “an attack on the property rights of a classified employee. That’s the only thing that gives them protection from layoff and political abuse in the guise of a layoff,” he said.
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