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City Wants to Overhaul Employee Hiring, Firing Practices

By DNAinfo Staff on January 7, 2011 1:48pm

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pushing for an overhaul of the city's hiring practices.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pushing for an overhaul of the city's hiring practices.
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DNAinfo/Jill Colvin

By Jill Colvin

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

MANHATTAN — Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pushing for a complete overhaul of the city’s hiring system, with new rules that would make it easier to hire and fire workers.

The new rules would allow the city to lay off teachers based on merit instead of seniority, make it easier to punish city employees and reduce the focus on hiring exams.

The recommendations are based on a Workforce Reform Task Force report released Friday that said the rules governing the city's civil service are "inflexible," "outdated," and costing the city millions.

"We have the best workforce in the world, but the civil service is so antiquated that it prevents them from performing up to their abilities, costs taxpayers millions of dollars in unnecessary expenditures, and prevents us from retaining and promoting our best workers," Bloomberg said in a statement.

If implemented, the changes would be the biggest to the state's civil service system since it was established in 1883, the New York Times reported.

The report calls for a new system for laying off teachers based on performance instead of seniority. Under the current rules, the city must lay off teachers and other civil service employees based solely on how long they've been on the job, the report said.

The "'Last in, first out' is a quality-blind approach that can force principals to lay off excellent teachers while retaining others who are less effective, the report's authors wrote, arguing that the policy is particularly harmful to low-income schools that tend to have more junior teachers.

But United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said that the seniority rules are in place for a reason.

"The seniority layoff process is part of state law and a critical guarantee against discrimination," he said in a statement.

"As the city's principals union has said: 'Once seniority protections are removed, we are concerned that issues such as cronyism, nepotism, religion, race and age would once again become problems in our city schools,'" Mulgrew said.

The task force also called for changing disciplinary procedures to allow the city to suspend workers who have engaged in serious misconduct immediately, instead of having to wait until a month before a hearing.

In addition to the firing and disciplinary changes, the task force also recommends reducing the city's dependence on civil service exams for hiring decisions. Right now, the state requires the city to rank candidates based on exam results, without taking merit or previous experience and performance into account. The report also suggested reducing the number of exams. 

Bloomberg said he will begin implementing several of the suggestions "immediately," but most will require approval in Albany since they require changing state rules.

Harry Nespoli, chairman of the Municipal Labor Committee, which represents union workers across the city, told the Times he would fight any legislation.

"It sounds to me that they want to handpick the people who work for the city," he told the paper. "That’s not what civil service is about."