Public Personnel Admin and Human Resources

1. Public Personnel Adminand Human Resources Town Hall Unit #4 Prof. Christopher L. Howard

2. Diversity • The "business case for diversity", theorizes that in a global marketplace, a company that employs a diverse workforce (both men and women, people of many generations, people from ethnically and racially diverse backgrounds etc.) is better able to understand the demographics of the marketplace it serves and is thus better equipped to thrive in that marketplace than a company that has a more limited range of employee demographics. • An additional corollary suggests that a company that supports the diversity of its workforce can also improve employee satisfaction, productivity and retention. This portion of the business case, often referred to as inclusion, relates to how an organization utilizes its various relevant diversities. If a workforce is diverse, but the employer takes little or no advantage of that breadth of that experience, then it cannot monetize whatever benefits background diversity might offer. • In most cases, US employers are prohibited by federal and state laws from giving race or ethnicity any consideration in hiring or assigning employees.[citation needed] However, the US Supreme Court has upheld the use of limited preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex, when there is a “manifest imbalance” in a “traditionally segregated job category.”[1][2] • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_(business)

3. Public Personnel Administration • Public personnel administration is a branch of human resource management that is concerned with the acquisition, development, utilization and compensation of a public organization’s workforce. The term "public personnel administration" includes three key words. First, "public" refers to regional and local governmental agencies as well as non-profit ones. "Personnel" refers to human resources who work in the public sector and provide public services to society. Third, "administration" refers to the management of human resources in public organizations in an effective and efficient way that helps the organization reach its goals and objectives. • There are four main functions of public personnel administration. The first, planning, includes preparing staffing plans and budgets, deciding how employees will be used, and setting pay rates. Acquisition is the second, and refers to selecting and recruiting employees. The third is development, which involves employee training and advancement programs, as well as performance evaluations. Sanctions, the fourth function, deal with employer-employee relationships, and may include workplace safety and handling grievances. • Some of the most important tasks performed by public personnel administrators include managing employee grievances and employee retention. Public organizations, more so than private ones, have formal grievance procedures that ensure due process and guarantee employee rights. Due process is giving an employee the opportunity to explain and defend his or her actions. Employee retention programs focus on the importance of keeping good employees as opposed to finding new ones. It includes programs such as training, development, and tuition assistance to help build loyalty and reduce turnover. • . http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-public-personnel-administration.htm

4. Public PersonnelAdministration • Public personnel administrators often carry their work within the context of four core, often contradictory, societal values. These include responsiveness, or political loyalty; the rights of the individual; efficiency, or the ability to perform the job; and social equity, or leveling the playing field. Responsiveness relates to the importance of considering political loyalty in addition to education and experience when making employee staffing decisions. In fact, the main difference between public and private personnel administration is the political context and the intervention of politicians and their supporters in decisions affecting public employees. • Efficiency, on the other hand, is the practice of basing appointments on ability and performance, rather than politics. The individual rights of employees are often preserved by national and regional laws, such as the Constitution in the United States; merit systems; and collective bargaining systems, if applicable. Social equity guarantees that groups that can not compete fairly are given preferences in job selection and promotion decisions • http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-public-personnel-administration.htm

5. Civil Service • The term civil service has two distinct meanings: • A civil servant or public servant is a civilian public sector employee working for a government department or agency. The term explicitly excludes the armed services, although civilian officials will work at "Defence Ministry" headquarters. The term always includes the (sovereign) state's employees; whether regional, or sub-state, or even municipal employees are called "civil servants" varies from country to country. In the United Kingdom, for instance, only Crown employees are referred to as civil servants, county or city employees are not. • Many consider the study of civil service to be a part of the field of public administration. Workers in "non-departmental public bodies" (sometimes called "QUANGOs") may also be classed as civil servants for the purpose of statistics and possibly for their terms and conditions. Collectively a state's civil servants form its Civil Service or Public Service. • No state of any extent can be ruled without a bureaucracy, but organizations of any size have been few until the modern era.[dubious – discuss][citation needed] Administrative institutions usually grow out of the personal servants of high officials, as in the Roman Empire. This developed a complex administrative structure, which is outlined in the Notitia Dignitatum and the work of John Lydus, but as far as we know appointments to it were made entirely by inheritance or patronage and not on merit, and it was also possible for officers to employ other people to carry out their official tasks but continue to draw their salary themselves. There are obvious parallels here with the early bureaucratic structures in modern states, such as the Office of Works or the Navy in 18th century England, where again appointments depended on patronage and were often bought and sold. • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service

6. Spoils System • In the politics of the United States, a spoil system (also known as a patronage system) is a practice where a political party, after winning an election, gives government jobs to its voters as a reward for working toward victory, and as an incentive to keep working for the party—as opposed to a system of awarding offices on the basis of some measure of merit independent of political activity. • The term was derived from the phrase "'to the victor belong the spoils" by New York Senator William L. Marcy,[1][2][3] referring to the victory of the Jackson Democrats in the election of 1828. • Similar spoils systems are common in other nations that are struggling to transcend systemic clientage based on tribal organization or other kinship groups and localism in general. • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system

7. Merit System • The merit system is the process of promoting and hiring government employees based on their ability to perform a job, rather than on their political connections. It is the opposite of the Spoils system. • The United States Civil Service utilized the Spoils System since 1828, until the assassination of United States President Garfield by a disappointed office seeker proved its dangers. Two years later the system of appointments to the United States Federal Bureaucracy was revamped by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act which made the merit system common practice. The president can only hand out a certain numbers of jobs which must be approved by the Senate. The civil service system of Kentucky is named "the Merit System". The merit system was started by Robert La Follette. Almost every occupation requires the merit system. • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_system

8. Position Classification • What is position classification? • Position Classification, first and foremost, is a way to ensure equal pay for substantially equal work. The classification system and standards are tools for assisting management in accomplishing the agency's mission. It assists in management activities such as designing organizations, recruiting for necessary expertise to perform the work, and establishing performance standards. Definitions: • Classification means the analysis and identification of a position and placing it in a class under the position classification plan established by OPM under chapter 51 of Title 5, United States Code. • Class means all positions, which are sufficiently similar as to: • kind or subject matter of work, • level of difficulty and responsibility, and • the qualification requirements of the work to warrant similar treatment in personnel and pay administration. • Grade is all classes of positions which (although different with respect to kind or subject-matter of work) are sufficiently equivalent as to: • level of difficulty and responsibility, and • level of qualification requirements of the work to warrant their inclusion within one range of rates of basic pay. • Position is the work, consisting of the duties and responsibilities, assigned by competent authority for designation of work to complete a function within an organization and to ensure performance by an employee • http://www.apfo.usda.gov/FSA/hrdapp?area=home&subject=nwem&topic=pos

9. Collective Bargaining • Collective bargaining is a process of voluntary negotiation between employers and trade unions) aimed at reaching agreements which regulate working conditions. Collective agreements usually set out wage scales, working hours, training, health and safety, overtime, grievance mechanisms and rights to participate in workplace or company affairs.[1] • The union may negotiate with a single employer (who is typically representing a company's shareholders) or may negotiate with a federation of businesses, depending on the country, to reach an industry wide agreement. A collective agreement functions as a labor contract between an employer and one or more unions. Collective bargaining consists of the process of negotiation between representatives of a union and employers (generally represented by management, in some countries[which?] by an employers' organization) in respect of the terms and conditions of employment of employees, such as wages, hours of work, working conditions and grievance-procedures, and about the rights and responsibilities of trade unions. The parties often refer to the result of the negotiation as a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) or as a collective employment agreement (CEA). • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_bargaining

10. Public Sector Unions • Growth in Public-Sector Unions • In 2009, 39 percent of state and local workers were members of unions, which was more than five times the share in the private sector of 7 percent, as shown in Figure 1.1 About two-thirds of government fire department and education workers are members of unions.2 If you include federal workers, the public sector accounts for more than half of all union members in the nation. • Prior to the 1960s, unions represented less than 15 percent of the state and local workforce.3 At the time, courts generally held that public-sector workers did not have the same union privileges that private workers had under the 1935 Wagner Act, such as collective bargaining. • That changed during the 1960s and 1970s, as a flood of pro-union laws in dozens of states triggered a dramatic rise in public-sector unionism.4 Many states passed laws that encouraged or required collective bargaining in the public sector, and states also passed laws to impose compulsory union dues and fees on government workers. • http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb_61.pdf

11. Unions Continued • Why has public-sector unionism thrived while private-sector unionism has shriveled? One reason is that public agencies tend to be static—once a union has organized a group of workers they tend to stay organized. By contrast, the private sector is dynamic, with businesses going bankrupt and new businesses arising all the time. Since all new businesses start out nonunion, greater organizing efforts are needed to sustain private-sector unions. • Another factor is that many government services are legal monopolies, such as police and fire. The result is that consumers don’t have the option of abandoning unionized public services if they become too inefficient, as they can with unionized services in the private sector. • http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb_61.pdf

12. Comparable Worth • Comparable Worth (also called pay equity) - A reform effort to pay different job titles the same based on their value to their employer regardless of the gender predominance of those working in such titles. • At the heart of comparable worth or pay equity is the fact that jobs traditionally done by women have been systematically undervalued in the marketplace. The net result is that jobs disproportionately held by women are paid less than comparable jobs with the same levels of skills and responsibilities but commonly held by males. This bias against women's work can be demonstrated and subsequently eliminated by assessing the economic value of different jobs through the use of gender-neutral job evaluation systems. For example, secretarial and janitorial jobs can be compared on dimensions such as the education/training needed, the working conditions, the responsibility involved and effort required. • Pay equity job evaluation studies seek to differentiate legitimate wage differences from those that are solely a function of the sex of the typical job incumbent. Sometimes salary inequities are so blatant that advocates can simply offer them as evidence without providing job evaluation measures. For instance, a substantial proportion of school districts in the U.S. pay secretaries and teaching assistants considerably less than the cleaners. In Denver, nurses were found to make less than gardeners. In New York State, school nurses in the West Islip school district start at $27,000, groundsmen at $29,000. In most cases, however, the process establishing the comparable value of dissimilar job titles from diverse occupational groups involves a complex process of job evaluation. • http://www.payequityresearch.com/worth.htm

13. Affirmative Action • “Affirmative action” means positive steps taken to increase the representation of women and minorities in areas of employment, education, and business from which they have been historically excluded. When those steps involve preferential selection—selection on the basis of race, gender, or ethnicity—affirmative action generates intense controversy. • The development, defense, and contestation of preferential affirmative action has proceeded along two paths. One has been legal and administrative as courts, legislatures, and executive departments of government have made and applied rules requiring affirmative action. The other has been the path of public debate, where the practice of preferential treatment has spawned a vast literature, pro and con. Often enough, the two paths have failed to make adequate contact, with the public quarrels not always very securely anchored in any existing legal basis or practice. • The ebb and flow of public controversy over affirmative action can be pictured as two spikes on a line, the first spike representing a period of passionate debate that began around 1972 and tapered off after 1980, and the second indicating a resurgence of debate in the 1990s leading up to the Supreme Court's decision in the summer of 2003 upholding certain kinds of affirmative action. The first spike encompassed controversy about gender and racial preferences alike. This is because in the beginning affirmative action was as much about the factory, the firehouse, and the corporate suite as about the university campus. The second spike represents a quarrel about race and ethnicity. This is because the burning issue at the turn of the twentieth-first century is about college admissions.[1] In admissions to selective colleges, women need no boost; African-Americans and Hispanics do.[2] • http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/affirmative-action/

14. Equal EmploymentOpportunity Commission • Federalenforcement agency enacted to ensure that employers follow and abide by rules set forth in the Civil RightsAct of 1964. Under the act employers must not deny employment or promotions based on someone's race, religion, sex, or national origin. The EEOC handles all claims of discrimination within the workforce and will investigate and prosecute all violators. The agency is also in charge of implementing anti-discrimination laws to protect employees from unlawful actions. Some companies and states have similar agencies to handle requests at the local level. • http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/Equal-Employment-Opportunity-Commission-EEOC.html

15. Program Implementation • Getting a program up and running is a huge accomplishment. Keeping it running smoothly takes a lot of hard work and perseverance. In order to be successful in maintaining an effective program with positive outcomes, there needs to be strong leadership, consistent buy-in from families, LEAs, colleges, and community partners, and very importantly: flexibility. • With new opportunities come new challenges, and it is necessary for key stakeholders to continually be assessing and restructuring as new needs arise. It is also important to maintain creativity as programs can become stagnant; what was exciting and new and successful early on might need some tweaking and refreshing in order to keep up with stakeholder needs and interests. Keep in mind that coordinating such a program is a fluid process that needs to adapt to the changes of all parties involved. For those who are a part of this process, it is always exciting and certainly never boring! • http://www.transitiontocollege.net/PIfaq.html

16. Agency Rule Making • An agency's actions must be in accordance with its enabling statute, and courts will examine the agency records to determine whether the agency exceeded its lawmaking or judicial powers. Rigorous judicial oversight of agencies would defeat a cherished feature of administrative agency by eliminating agency flexibility in resolving conflicts. To avoid this outcome, most enabling statutes are worded vaguely, in such a way as to allow the agencies broad discretion in determining their rules and procedures. To keep agencies from wielding unbridled power, the ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURE ACT OF 1946 (APA) (5 U.S.C.A. § 551 [1982]) sets standards for the activities and rule making of all federal regulatory agencies. The APA provides federal courts with a framework for reviewing the rules made and procedures used by administrative agencies. Individual states have similar statutes to guide their own courts. • Read more: Administrative Agency - History Of Administrative Agency, Federal Administrative Agencies, State And Local Administrative Agencies, Further Readingshttp://law.jrank.org/pages/4066/Administrative-Agency.html#ixzz11PZqbkAC

17. Wrapping It Up • Diversity • Public Personnel Administration • Civil Service • Spoils system • Merit system • Position Classification • Collective Bargaining • Public Sector Unions • Comparable Worth • Affirmative Action • EEOC • Program Implementation • Agency Rule Making