The Necessity And Progress Of Civil Service Reform

"The Necessity and Progress of Civil Service Reform" is an address delivered by Carl Schurz at the Annual Meeting of the National Civil Service Reform League in Chicago, Ill., on December 12, 1894. Carl Schurz was a United States diplomat, soldier, politician, political activist, President of the National Civil Service Reform League, and writer.

Excerpt from The Necessity and Progress of Civil Service Reform: An Address Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the National Civil-Service Reform League, December 12, 1894 Imagine, then, a bank the stockholders of which, many in number, are divided into two factions - let us call them the Jones party and the Smith party - who quarrel about some question of business policy, as, for instance, whether the bank is to issue currency or not. The Jones party is in control, but the Smith men persuade over to their side a suflicient number of Jones men to give them - the Smith men - a majority at the next stockholders' meeting. Thus they succeed in getting the upper hand. They oust the old board of directors, and elect a new board consisting of Smith men. The new Smith board at once remove all the emeers, president, cashier, tellers, bookkeepers, and clerks down to the messenger boys the good and the bad alike - simply because they are Jones men, and fill their places forthwith with new per sons who are selected, not on the ground that they have in any way proved their fitness for the positions so filled, but simply because they are Smith men; and those of the Smith men who have shown the greatest zeal and skill in getting a majority of votes for the Smith party are held to have the strongest claims for salaried places in the bank. The new men struggle painfully with the duties novel to them until they acquire some experience, but even then it needs in many instances two men or more to do the work of one. In the course of events dissatisfaction spreads among the stockholders with the Smith management, partly shared by ambitious Smith men who thought themselves entitled to reward in the shape of places and salaries, but were left out in the cold. Now the time fora new stockholders' meeting arrives. After a hot fight the Jones party carries the day. Its ticket of directors being elected, 05 go the heads of the Smith president, the Smith cashier, the Smith tellers. The Smith book keepers and clerks, to be replaced by true-blue Jones men who have done the work of the campaign and are expected to do more of it when the next election comes. And so the career of the bank goes on withits periodical changes of party in power at longer or shorter intervals, and its corresponding clean sweeps of the bank service, with mismanagement and occa sional fraud and peculation as inevitable incidents. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The authors of this book contend that the civil service system, which was devised to create a uniform process for recruiting high-quality workers to government, is no longer uniform or a system. Nor does it help government find and retain the workers it needs to build a government that works. The current civil service system was designed for a government in which federal agencies directly delivered most public services. But over the last generation, privatization and devolution have increased the number and importance of government's partnerships with private companies, nonprofit organizations, and state and local governments. Government workers today spend much of their time managing these partnerships, not delivering services, and this trend will only accelerate in the future. The authors contend that the current system poorly develops government workers who can effectively manage these partnerships, resulting too often in a gap between promise and performance. This short, lively, and bipartisan volume, authored by the nation's leading experts on government management, describes what the government of the future will look like, what it will need to work well, and how in particular the nation can build the next generation of workers required to lead it.

This collection of papers was presented at the World Bank Conference on 'Civil service reform in Latin America and the Caribbean', held in 1993. The goal of the conference was to promote the flow of ideas among researchers and practitioners in the civil s