I was planning to follow up on an announcement a few weeks ago from Boston City Hall, but I’ve outsourced much of my research to a guy in India — and he was on vacation.
The outsourcing/privatization itch is being scratched more feverishly almost everywhere these days — even in Connecticut, where Gov. Rell offered up the highway rest stops to the tender mercies of a private contractor.
At the Hartford Business Journal, the editor has been outsourced to a robot. You slip the story into a slot and the electronic voice says, “make it shorter, make it better — no raise for you again this year.” It’s uncanny; just like having the home-grown editor, except for the cigars and whiskey.
The Boston announcement was an obituary for the municipal printing department, which will apparently be disbanded and the printing work put out to bid.
There were the usual sad stories about guys who had worked in the city printing facility since the days of letterpress and Linotype machines. The fear is that most of them will drift into newspaper column writing — a nightmarish path with no future.
The privatization push by state and local governments are inevitably tied to tough economic times; to a current need to save some bucks and disgorge government employees and their big, fat, stupid pensions and union rules and overtime nightmares.
The government boys shouldn’t squander the opportunity to promote privatization as a philosophical blessing, quite aside from the financial benefit. The murky notion of ‘smaller government’ seemingly has little resonance in the modern age, but what privatization can offer is literally ‘smaller’ government — while not necessarily shrinking government provision of goods and services.
Government as a purchasing agent, as opposed to the direct provider of public goods, is a relatively benign notion to most folks not on a government payroll.
It was Steve Goldsmith, long in residence at Harvard’s Kennedy School, who as the mayor of Indianapolis, popularized the notion that if government could find specific goods or services in the Yellow Pages, the obligation should be put out to bid. Goldsmith has now been snared by New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to run the top-secret Subversive Office of Quiet Privatization Planning, Which We Won’t Tell Anybody About.
Privatization isn’t perfect, of course. You must turn to Cohen the Columnist if what you’re looking for is perfection. A well-run, well-conceived government privatization effort requires something that government finds difficult to muster: aggressive, competent contract compliance monitoring and enforcement.
The Heartland Institute, a conservative, Chicago-based public policy think tank that views privatization as one step removed from a sacrament, once acknowledged in an aggressive broadside that “bribery, political influence, and ‘sweetheart deals’ can infect the process of contracting out public services.” But, the policy guys added, much the same happens in the public sector, without the potential cure of open bidding and competition.
In jurisdictions where the public-sector employee unions reign supreme, one trick occasionally attempted in the privatization game is to allow the government employees to participate in the bidding process. There are examples of work-rule inanities magically disappearing, when union employees get a sniff of a real marketplace.
A handful of recently incorporated city-suburb enclaves outside of Atlanta have declared themselves ‘contract cities’ — putting almost everything out to bid, reducing town hall to a manager, a secretary and a pot of petunias. Louisiana’s tax department, which tends to ignore ringing telephones, is mulling the outsourcing of its call center.
I have to stop now. The private contractor’s robot editor is beeping at me.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
