From the HBO show guide: The outlaw camp of Deadwood marches slowly towards civilization… But the power struggles continue over
everything in Deadwood–influence, money, and whores–as the founding
camp members form strategic alliances to face down the threat of a
powerful newcomer, seeking to remake Deadwood in his image.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa hit a sore spot with his carelessly revealing remark about his scheme to avoid layoffs by getting rid of the “deadwood” in city government by offering older workers five extra years in retirement credits to pad their pensions.
First off, it’s a remark filled with prejudice against the elderly, the kind of thing that he would jump all over if someone else said that about protected classes he cares about.
Second, it’s plain wrong. The deadwood in city government or any organization comes in all shapes, sizes and ages. And any organization that doesn’t deal with low performers on a regular basis is destined to fail.
Third, CIty Hall has created a system designed for failure though sweetheart contracts and civil service rules that make it impossible to have any degree of real workplace discipline. Achievement is no more rewarded, then failure punished.
Worst of all, eliminating thousands of older workers whatever their skills or value has a greater negative impact on the city than eliminating jobs that provide the least public benefit. It
may be the worst alternative since the city faces so many problems and needs experienced and competent managers more than ever.
The mayor has overseen an explosion in city spending, created a $530 million deficit, raised taxes, rates and fees faster than ever and approved massive wage increases to city workers. He is the unions’ mayor, not the people’s mayor, and his “deadwood” crack has even turned labor against him.
“Some people have given 20, 30, 35 years of their
lives to the city. They help make it run, they know how to get things done…”
– Bob Schoonover, President of SEIU Local 721
Here’s what the Engineers and Architects Association posted:
I’M NOT DEADWOOD, MR. MAYOR
The Mayor referred to valued long time City employees as “deadwood”. The employees he is referring to are the same individuals that are responsible in large part for police and fire services and all of the other vital services that the City of Los Angeles provides to the citizens of our city. These individuals he refers to as “deadwood” are even responsible for doing the work that the Mayor takes credit for.
In these troubled financial times when the Mayor is supposed to be uniting employees, and he is asking them to make even more sacrifices, it is unconscionable for him to refer to his employees as “deadwood”. This indicates a basic arrogance and lack of respect on his part. Copy and paste the following paragraph and email it to the Mayor if you agree:
mayor@lacity.org
Mr. Mayor, I work very hard day in and day out to do the best job possible for you, the Council, and most importantly, the citizens of Los Angeles. Shame on you for referring to me as “deadwood”.
Join EAA Executive Director Bob Aquino at the Los Angeles City Council
session at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, April 24th, when he expresses his
disappointment to the City Council over the Mayor’s disrespect of City
employees.
Mr. Mayor,
I consider your remarks quoted in today’s LA Times referring to senior City employees as “deadwood” to be stereotypical and discriminatory.
I give 150% to my City job every day. For years I have put in extra time without compensation (long before any furloughs were thought of) and didn’t expect any because I take pride in serving the City.
All City employees regardless of seniority should be judged on their individual merits. If we were to refer to one of our subordinates in this manner we would be accused of age discrimination.
Many senior employees continue to make positive contributions based upon knowledge and experience. Now our capabilities have been devalued and denigrated in a major City newspaper.
Senior employees act as mentors providing real world experience to the “younger” staff assisting them to acquire the essential skills to be more productive.
You have spoken many times on the diversity of our City and now it appears those were empty words. Elected officials come and go, but City employees are the backbone that keep the City functioning and safe.
We do not appreciate being callously and indifferently referred to as the useless baggage of deadwood.
Attention city workers, we all know you work hard for your money. It’s not your fault you have landed in the highest paid union protected jobs in America. You get more paid days off than normal workers. Supplied with cars and gas vouchers you can go to and from work on taxpayer dollars. So we are supposed to be happy you have supplied the taxpayers of Los Angeles with the minimum amount of services while we watch our infrastructure crumble. The real deadwood in Los Angeles is our peckerhead mayor Tony V. allowing the inside deals with special interests, developers and kissing up to the unions. City workers consider yourselves lucky you still have a job and be sure to give it an extra effort to help the citizens in this great city of angels.
So Mr. Schoonover thinks the older, experienced employees help make the City run, and they know how to get things done. Well Bob, if that’s the case, why are you pushing a retirement contribution increase so the City can pay to get rid of the people who “know how to get things done”? Have you read Laura Chick’s report on the lack of secession planning in the City? A mass exodus of senior employees without replacements will be extraordinarily costly in efficiency and getting things accomplished. As it is, you have people who’ve been patiently holding off their retirements because of an expected buyout. If the Mayor finally came out and said it’s not affordable, those people will leave anyway, and it won’t put the City and pension plan further into debt. Maybe its time for the unions to think a bit about bankrupting the citizens of L.A.
As a side observation to this picture, Mr. Aquino- you will really get a dose of waste and upside-down priorities if you still are planning on going to a Friday City Council meeting, aka the “dog and pony show.” Be forewarned, take a snack, too.
Unless some change in Council behavior happens, expect to sit out at least an hour of a demonstration of Council members practicing one-upsmanship of praise and appreciation for each successive award recipient. Rarely is the Mayor present, so any complaints will fall on deaf ears, or so it will seem.
Since the topic seems NOT to be an agenda item, the Council members would not be able to reply in more than 50 words or they would be committing a violation of the Brown Act provisions. Maybe LaBonge, nevertheless, will go into some impromptu speech and maybe Rosendahl might try to apologize for Tony and side with you, but they can fall back on the law in keeping silent on this one topic as a non-agenda item. They are stooges more often than they care to realize, and it’s actually better for them not to try to explain the comments of a mayor delirious with thoughts of a Governor’s race.
Only by getting an item on the agenda will you be able to prompt a discussion among the council; and even then, the council just gives lip service and then votes in unanimous fashion as if the words just spoken by commenters had not even been noticed.
An interesting time is in store for your Friday Council meeting visit. The council members, most of them, are disciples of Tony and will back him up out of political considerations, so that should be no surprise.
Maybe someday they will put city business first and then do the awards after that work is completed. So there’s your real deadwood in action. The other prima facie example of deadwood, as I earlier mentioned, will not be there, maybe doing some of his work during the “11%” of time he spends on such things as the Mayor.
1:42: When you talk of Laura’s Chick’s report on “secession planning,” do you mean “recession planning?” Freudian slip revealing your REAL wish, maybe? That the Valley HAD seceded back when? Except you’d still be stuck with Alarcon’s Pacoima with its biggest rate of foreclosures in the city as he keeps telling us, the poverty there and in parts of Cardenas’ area, etc. Another gang of Mexican Mafia members was just busted there — actually with the revitalization of Hollywood, Downtown and the westside, you’d have been no better off unless you wanted to make it the WEST west valley only maybe. And even then, LAPD has had to open a new bureau there because of gangs.
BUT I do think Laura Chick should have done much more to audit and inform the Mayor and leadership about the budget problem years ago, instead of little things that got her PR (like spending tens of thousands to criticize LAPD for spending $18,000 on bottled water over 18 months — there must be worst wastes than that $1,000/ month anywhere else she could have looked).
He’s being criticized in the Times today for being unable to identify just how many and which workers and depts. are essential or not, but that should be the Controller’s and CAO’s job. Antonio never pretended to be a detail guy, that’s what the Controller, CAO, Legislative Analyst and the Council Committees working with dept. heads and HIS Deputy Mayors and staff are supposed to do. Now there’s finger-pointing back and forth and a scramble to raise fees for everything from parking to libraries, but Chick was as responsible for the mess as anyone, and now she gets to run off to Sacramento where she’s in charge of distributing billions in DC stimulus funds. Nice for her.
Laura Chick never tackled the really BIG issues where she could have been proactive, preferring to “discover” things like the DNA evidence kit backlog which others had been working on for years formulating specific solutions. And while she may have been right about Delgadillo’s office neither of them should have turned it into a public battle of wills — she grandstands for her own benefit, and now she’s got the job she’s wanted. But the city is left holding the bag.
2:53. The report was completed last week, by an independent consultant, and is available on the Controller’s website. The relevant paragraph is straightforward, and doesn’t wander as you have, so see if you can absorb what is said in this summary paragraph. The essence is that if you don’t plan for the replacements of the experienced help, you are in trouble with your workforce, and to actually pay people to leave is like deliberately shooting yourself in the foot, or more likely, in the current situation, shooting yourself in the head, as the City unions would have us do.
“For the City to ensure that it can face the challenges of a changing workforce, population growth, and increasing complexity of the services it provides, it must establish a strategic approach to its human resources management processes. Needed will be a commitment to workforce and succession planning, building and identifying needed skills and expertise, addressing the gaps in automation and management information that exist, and adopting a future-looking citywide, rather than department-specific approach to finding, hiring, and retaining top employees.”
7:18: Maybe if you lerned how to spoll you wouldn’t have to try to condescendingly lecture others about “wandering” and being unable to absord your gems of wisdom.
As noted at 2:53 you write about “secession planning” which is NOT “succession planning,” as you clarify and which apparently Chick’s report is about.
Even so the report lays out just a broad template by way of suggested approach to the problem, NOT anything that is helpful in resolving the problem — as typical of her “audits.”
1:14
There’s only one union that’s perceived as overpaid, and that’s the IBEW. And even that is debatable when you compare IBEW salaries to engineers at other utilities who do the same exact work. So since when did one union suddenly became ALL CITY WORKERS?
1:42
One of the reasons the DWP PRP was proposed was to address this in the utilities sector – get some overlap in between the newer generation of engineers and retiring veterans so knowledge about the infrastructure could be passed down. Yet the general consensus here seems to consider the PRP and accompanying rate hikes to pay for the PRP a waste of money.
Mr. Mayor,
Why are you only trying to get rid of the “deadwood” in some City Departments and not City-wide? Do you mean that there’s no “deadwood” in the Department of Water & Power, the Harbor, and the Airports? Is it unfair that you only apply that to some and NOT all City Departments?
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