[PRCo] Re: development and transportation infrastructure.

[Fred Schneider]

Gentlemen:

You have no idea.  John does.  I do.  We worked for the state.  I had a
wonderfully brilliant boss who retired in 1974 and died about five years ago.
When Joe retired, he claimed he was going to write the ultimate tell-all book
about government.  Several years later when I asked about the progress of the
tome, Joe remarked, "Gave it up.  After much soul searching I concluded no one
would believe it."

Maybe there are people out there who understand that government is asked to build
things that no sane private financier would dream of underwriting.  But how many
of you would recognize that once undertaken by government, the project needs a
political friend at the helm, and in order to justify his highly inflated salary,
we need to add many layers of supervision and drones under that manager or bureau
director who do virtually nothing.  Remember there are rules.  We've spent years
setting up a bureaucracy that specifies that salaries are based on the number and
level of the people under you.   Low level managers may end up with an unexpected
promotion because their people did a fine job and it was necessary to continually
add more people to compensate for the service given to a community.  But higher
level managers are friends ... they start high and a large staff is created as
their birthright.   (Just look at how our former Republican governor got a
birthright when he moved to homeland insecurity in Washington.)

When I started in labor statistics in 1969, I recognized that we had seven people
in our district filling jobs for four.  The number of staff eventually expanded to
nine because money was there to spend.   Government never turns down an
opportunity to spend money.  The downward change came when the federal government
decided that such a bureaucracy wasn't needed, and froze salaries for a decade.
The number today is about two.   Over all, the staffing in labor data programs in
Pennsylvania dropped from a peak of more than 200 people down to fewer than 100 in
ten years.  But that was truly exceptional.  A lot of the drop was aided by
personal computers making it possible for professionals to do their own analysis
but also to eliminate a lot of clerical help.   I've always wondered how many
people would be needed to do the work, and at what salary, if it was all farmed
out to local chambers of commerce ... my thoughts are that it would require no
additional help.   What happened to the quality of work?  As we dropped staff, we
ended up without the worst of the deadwood.  We couldn't spend as much time on
precision but we also got rid of the some of the most inaccurate workers.  Sounds
strange doesn't it.  Maybe that is why I liked my work for so many years ...
because I was surrounded by a lot of competent people in the later years (in those
years when most of us become dissatisfied with our work).  That was also a truly
unusual situation for a tax supported industry!

Derrick J Brashear wrote:

> On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, John Swindler wrote:
>
> > I enjoyed looking at your link to the state budget, Derrick, which is
> > apparently something PennDOT management doesn't care to share with employees
> > - or is also unaware that it exists (that should open a flood-gate of snide
> > comments)
>
> Normally I'd plug Google, but in this case I just used the "search"
> feature on www.state.pa.us (which may be Google-powered).
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