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

jurisdictions (437). Mosher’s describes the basic concessions in the historic concept of sovereignty, the modification in the ideal of individualism in the merit system as it developed in the U.S. (440). Mosher concludes that civil service and defenders of government hegemony urge that collective bargaining threatens political democracy, the ultimate power as political representative control the destines of government and conditions of its employees (441).
“Merit-based Pay and Employee Motivation in Federal Agencies” by Sungjoo Choi and Andrew B.

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

(6).
“Representative Bureaucracy: The Politics of Access to Policy-Making Positions in the Federal Executive Service” by Ronald C. Clark., et al. focuses on demonstrating that partisanship and ideology influence the demographic composition of the federal senior executives. Diversity is salient as it indicates democracy, inclusion, parity, citizenship and equal opportunity. Diversity also allows in federal workforces as enhances innovation and problem solving and strengthens employees’ retention which also improves government performance (76). Clark, et al. described the objectives of this article as analyzing relationship between party identification and demographic representation of senior executive in federal executive branch departments, the upward mobility prospects for women and people of color and whether public policy change is necessary to attain diversity in federal senior executive position (77). Representative bureaucracy is defined in the article as “the relationship between a demographically representative public service and policy out-comes” while passive representation is how the bureaucracies demographically reflects their constituents (77). Their findings show that partisanship and ideology seems to influence the demographic composition of senior federal executives as the analysis indicates the fluctuations among administrations to presidents appointing individuals with similar ideological (85). Racial preference in career executive appointments and detracts from the notion of attaining a “representative” bureaucracy at the highest level of the federal workforce (86).
Public officials are responsive to their superiors as superiors who are appointed tend to have a very similar ideology of the individual who appointed them. Public officials often are responsive to the public as they have a lot of matters that are directly influenced by the public. Administrators act the way they do because they have an incentive to gain more political positioning as the way they is based on the ways that they give orders, increasing potential for reelections and further genifiting from the situation.