Merit: A Union View

Abstract

years was carried into office with the FDR victory. With jobs a scarce commodity, Democrats in the executive and the legislature wasted little time before turning to the business at hand: finding work in state government for the faithful. The state's civil service system, enacted in 1905 and one of the best in the country at the time, was to be chopped up at the expense of the cadre of career civil service employees assembled during the LaFollette Progressive Republican years. To fend off this assault, state employees, with support from LaFollette administrators who were genuinely opposed to the spoils system, banded together into what became the Wisconsin State Employees Association. Through lobbying and political activity they saved the civil service system. The association stayed together and prospered. Today it is the nation's largest public employee union-the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The phenomenal growth of the union in recent years and the ballyhooed new militancy of the public worker has shaded over those modest beginnings. There has been a common assumption among many students of public employee labor relations, including many who are actively involved, that the rising chant for full collective bargaining on wages, hours, and working conditions by public workers inevitably amounts to capital punishment for civil service as a personnel tool in public administration. It isn't true. The emphasis that AFSCME and a few other unions have placed on collective bargaining should not be seen as an abandonment of the merit ideal. It merely reflects a firming-up into policy of a view which has been held for many of us who have been intimately involved with the civil service during the past 20 years: that the civil service or merit system is first, second, and finally, management's personnel tool. What Is Merit?