A Proposal for State and Local Government Budgets

[MineralMan]

This is sort of tongue-in-cheek, but not really.

Government Bureaucracy Streamlining Proposal

Eliminate at least one management level in all state and local agencies. Management employees are, generally, the least productive of all government employees, and have the highest salaries. Most government bureaucracies are run entirely by the people who actually do the work of that agency.

There are usually at least two or three management levels above the people who actually are working there. The top level of management does nothing but sit at an empty desk and take meetings. At those meetings, nothing is generally accomplished, but top management uses them to justify its existence. Broad, useless plans for changes are generally the result of these meetings.

At the next level of management are those who attend the meetings called by top management. Made up primarily of head-nodders and chair-sitters, this level of management takes the initiatives generated by the top-level meetings and writes memos to be ignored by the third management level.

The third level of management, also made up primarily of chair-sitters, does do a minor amount of work in aid of the bureaucratic business conducted by the agency. This generally consists of creating new memos, forms, and other paperwork to be completed, then filed or discarded, by the people who are supposed to be actually working.

In many agencies, a fourth level of management exists. Its job is to harass employees by assigning unnecessary tasks and creating an endless number of reports to pass to the third level of management for shredding and disposal.

Below this level are the employees who perform some useful work in the agency. These are the people who interact with the public, process the necessary paperwork, and expedite the services of the agency. When they are not generating useless paperwork for the first level of management above them, they are actually performing useful functions in many cases.

The actual working employees know what their job is and are familiar with all tasks. When management is absent from the workplace, the work proceeds even more efficiently, due to the lack of harassment from management. Things go along more or less smoothly when management is in meetings or attending conferences.

Therefore, eliminating at least two levels of management would increase productivity, eliminate the cost of paying useless chair-sitters and meeting-goers, and result in major cost savings. If some supervision is required, then promoting actual workers and increasing their pay by a modest amount should suffice. Such promotions should be done by election by peers, to insure that potential harassers and time-wasters are not promoted.

Thank you for your attention. Your comments are welcome.

[MineralMan]

1. To add:

Those workers who get promoted would still be doing their work. They'd just be the ones other workers could come to to get questions answered when necessary. In most cases, they're already doing that anyhow.

[FarCenter]

2. The upper levels of state and local bureaucracies are filled with political appointees

If they are eliminated, how will the parties reward their big supporters?

[customerserviceguy]

3. While your concept is laudable

In practice, it would work only by those who are in the eliminated layer of management simply pushing into the jobs of the level below them. This will continue on and on, until the lowly "new hire" from three years ago is stuck out on the street, and will simply be on the unemployment rolls.