On Saturday I visited the Valencia library to do some research on, ironically, the Civil Service system established in the wake of the 1882 Pendleton Act.
I hadn’t been to the library since the City Council’s vote to evict COLA from the SCV, so, suffice it to say, I was researching more than one topic as I often do when visiting places in the SCV.
The Valencia library has been extensively modernized in the last few years. In place of the long service desk that used to occupy the entrance, there are now several self-service checkout kiosks with bar code readers and bright LCD displays. Free WiFi is available to those with a Library card and pin number, and the place, as usual, was a bustling hive of activity. The Valencia library is the best-used non-park public resource in the SCV, in my opinion.
I sat down with a reference librarian to talk about my project. As she searched for resources on the Pendleton Act, I asked her about the secession from COLA and whether she would apply for a job with LSSI.
She looked uncomfortable, as if she had been asked that by a lot of patrons. She had a quick answer as she glanced away.
“No. I think most of us are going to stay with the County,” she told me.
And why wouldn’t she? To merge my two research topics briefly, the Pendleton Act established the merit system for civil service. Before the Pendleton Act, people were employed by local and federal governments based on who, rather than what, they knew. The “spoils system,” as it was called, applied to just about every public employee, from Cabinet Secretary to letter carrier, and your job as a civil servant literally depended on whether an elected official favored you and on the degree to which you financially supported that elected official. You, as a civil servant, were expected to fund the campaigns of your elected patrons. The system was entirely corrupt and, worse yet, tolerated incompetence.
In the decades after the Pendleton Act was signed into law, people who wanted to work for the government had to take exams to prove that they were competent. They had to be educated and know what they were doing. The power of local and national political bosses and parties diminished and the professionalism of government workers increased as a result. The professionalism we see in our city, county, state, federal government and even our local libraries today is a direct result of the Pendleton Act passed in the 19th Century.
But that was 128 years ago. Today we’re in a brave new world where we think our Civil servants are paid too much and are too entrenched in their jobs. Oh, it’s not that they do a bad job necessarily, it’s just that they cost too much. They may live among us as neighbors and work among us, but they’re costing us too much.
Our solution to this supposed problem, locally at least, is to fire them all and hire fewer private workers to do the same job at a lesser rate. Our solution is to unThink SCV and take the money we would have put in their salaries and pension and instead funnel it to a private company headquartered in Maryland. This great privatization experiment, we’re told, will yield better results.
Will it? I have no idea. But I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the hard-working and friendly library employees at the Valencia library on Saturday. In the wake of the “Great Recession,” they face an uncertain future, cast aside by a Santa Clarita City Council that professed love and appreciation for them but shucked them away as quickly as possible during a three hour Council meeting in August.
And what of our city staff, so certain in their analysis, so quick to dismiss public librarians? If privatization is good for the libraries, why not for City Hall? Why can’t we hire Ernst & Young in lieu of the Accounting & Finance people, HP or Dell in lieu of IT, and a local engineering company in lieu of the planning & engineering departments? What makes those workers so special over our library workers? Why should we fund their pensions if we can’t fund our librarians’?
I thumbed through a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s books on Saturday and ran across an instructive quote for those professional folks at City Hall, across the street from the Valencia library: “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Comments (25)