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Planned civil service changes irk N.J. state workers

New Jersey public employees are bracing for what their union leaders say is the latest anti-worker onslaught by the Christie administration.

New Jersey public employees are bracing for what their union leaders say is the latest anti-worker onslaught by the Christie administration.

The New Jersey Civil Service Commission, all of whose members are Gov. Christie's appointees, has proposed sweeping changes it says would streamline the promotion process, making it easier to advance top-notch people.

That's not how the unions see it. They say the changes would invite cronyism and political favoritism, discouraging state, county, and municipal workers who don't want to play politics.

"It's often been said that one man's flexibility is another man's cronyism," Ben Dworkin, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, pointed out.

"The major benefit of the . . . program," the proposed regulations say, "would be the provision of greater flexibility in the advancement of employees."

Exactly, said Hetty Rosenstein, the New Jersey leader of the Communications Workers of America, the union that represents most public employees in the state.

Unbound by complex protocols that involve examinations and outside reviews, managers would have more flexibility, Rosenstein said, "to select someone they like, someone who supports them politically, someone who looks like them, someone who shares their prejudices, and maybe somebody who gave them a bribe - that's not unheard of in New Jersey."

Civil Service Commission spokesman Peter Lyden declined to talk about the proposed regulations or to make Chairman Robert M. Czech available for an interview. Czech and the commission's three other members were appointed by Christie.

Under the current system, government jobs are structured by title, and advancement from one level in that title (for example, from clerk one to clerk two) requires either an examination or an outside review of applicants' qualifications by the Civil Service Commission based on established criteria.

Managers can choose from the top three candidates culled through that process. If a candidate feels the process has been handled unfairly, he or she can appeal to the commission.

Under the proposed rules, government jobs would be grouped into bands, with managers able to move employees from level to level within the bands without going through examinations or the commission's outside review. Job candidates who feel the process is unfair would no longer be able to appeal to the commission, but would have to appeal to the head of the agency - the agency that had already decided not to promote them.

Pennsylvania's Civil Service Commission does allow agencies to promote from one level of a job to the next without consulting lists of civil service workers who were qualified by examination, spokesman Jack McGettigan said. However, the candidate must meet established criteria, and losing candidates can appeal to the commission.

New Jersey's Civil Service Commission, which made the proposal, is also the group that will vote on it. The commission next meets June 26, with the agenda to be published Wednesday. The changes would affect 150,000 public employees.

Last week, a bill objecting to the changes was voted out of the Assembly's State Government Committee. Assemblyman Herb Conaway Jr. (D., Burlington) is one of four cosponsors of the bill.

Though the bill would not be binding on the commission, it would let it know where the Assembly stands, Conaway said.

"You ought to have the expectation that you'll be judged on some criteria, but not by race or sex or because you happen not to be related to the decision maker on the job," he said.

What the Civil Service Commission is proposing "is a trend in public employment," said David Thornburgh, director of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.

"It is broadening the bands of employment and lessening the reliance on seniority and tests and rote examination," he said. "That's been the trend in private employment.

"I think if you talk to people who manage government organizations, you'll hear their exasperation about managing people because their hands are tied by overly restrictive and outdated civil service procedures," he said.

The optimum scenario, he said, would be to give public employee managers more autonomy, but also to hold them more accountable for the success of their organizations.

Brigid Harrison, a political science and law professor at Montclair State University, sees the proposed change to the civil service regulations as part of a broader pattern of actions by Christie's Republican administration to erode collective bargaining.

In 2011, thousands of union members rallied in Trenton to protest a bill pushed by Christie that not only required them to pay more for health and pension benefits, but that took away their ability to negotiate those issues.

"When it came to certain issues of collective bargaining," she said, "the structure of civil service was a given."

Now, she said, instead of bargaining over issues of how promotions should be structured, the commission simply plans to change its regulations.

Beyond the proposal and one hearing, the commission and Czech have been mum on specifics. The proposal's 96 pages provide little in the way of example; a spokesman declined to make anyone available to answer questions, and commissioners skipped a second hearing on the changes called by the predominantly Democratic Assembly.

"That's deliberate," Rosenstein said. It's harder to mount opposition when it's not clear precisely how the new system would work, she said.

Rosenstein called the proposal unconstitutional, because, she said, quoting the state constitution, "appointments and promotions . . . shall be made according to merit . . . to be ascertained, as far as practicable, by examination."

Though most state workers are represented by the CWA, Karl R. Walko heads a union that has its roots as an association of public employees formed before they were allowed to unionize.

Walko said the Civil Service Commission was set up in 1908 to curtail cronyism. It was part of a reform agenda, he said, and it shouldn't be dismantled lightly.

"It's not that I think political people are bad people," said Walko, head of Camden County Council 10, which represents 1,600 county employees.

"But political pressure is always on them to hire somebody" or to promote them, with the pressure particularly intense - and personal - at the county and municipal levels.

The Civil Service Commission and its rules help politicians resist the pressure. "You kind of have to tie their hands," Walko said, "or they can't help themselves."