Democracy, Public Service and Federal Unions

Chapter 42 “Democracy and the Public Service: The Collective Services” by Frederick C. Mosher discusses unions as they were discouraged by conservative members of state legislatures, city councils, boards of education and county boards but they developed in parts of the federal establishment, and had a growing influence on federal employment policies (431). Federal unions have decreased in numbers of efforts to damaging the civil service as there aims was fundamentally the same as civil service, unions have civil service the common enemy of partisan patronage (431). The federal government avoids “collective bargaining” and “unions” but instead use “employee management cooperation” and “employee organizations” as general legitimacy of the unionization of public employees (433). Labor organization and collective bargaining are frowned upon in government for most of U.S. history and are still forbidden in some

Whitford explained how in the 1990’s, public management agenda had critical changes in the federal government’s merit system with limited job security and the innovation of merit-based pay systems (1). Merit-based pay systems is a part of governmental reform efforts but there is still challenges of implementing incentive systems as there are different organizational contexts (2). Choi and Whitford discuss how merit-based pay is limited in government settings by the inherent of public organizations. They also discuss how coercive control as an attempt to increase effort coercively instead of voluntarily as it measured by improved views of empowerment, task involvement and other sentimental results (4). This reading explains how employees when they are less satisfied with their workplaces and exposed to financial incentives will result in turnover and future incentives as merit-based pay is either inherently flawed or public organizations are bad places to implement it