The Key to Cost Savings? Hire More Public Service Workers

Anti-worker politicians like LA City Councilman Bernard Parks say they can save money by firing the public service workers who monitor our water quality, clean our parks and maintain our birth records. But here’s a better way to save money: hire more workers.
You see, just because you fire a bunch of workers doesn’t mean the work they did goes away. The public still needs clean drinking water, safe playgrounds and accurate records. So what do you do when you’ve gotten rid of all the professionals who know how to do this work? You hire a bunch of freelancers. In the business world, they call this outsourcing. And it’s costing our cities and state a heck of a lot of money–much more than it costs to hire workers–even unionized workers. How much more? At a press conference yesterday in downtown Los Angeles, city professionals released an excellent accounting of the cost of outsourcing. Hire a Project Manager from engineering giant Black and Veatch, for examples, and it’ll run you $255 an hour. Throw some work to a junior scientist from multinational AECOM, and you can expect to pay him or her $115 per hour. But here’s the thing: public workers can do the same work cheaper. As this chart shows,the per hour rate for city workers is significantly less than it is for those expensive consultants and freelancers. As Terry Keating, an LA City civil engineering associate points out, “The result is a costlier alternative squeezing city coffers dry.”   So why the rush to outsource so much work? First, by outsourcing work, elected officials can make the claim that they’re shrinking the size of the public workforce, as if that were a goal in and of itself, and thereby give the impression that they’re tough on wasteful spending. Second, large corporations are huge sources of campaign contributions; throw them lots of work and some of that money will come back in the form of donations, or so the theory goes. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can tell our elected officials that we want city work done right and done cheaply. And that means using public service employees to do it. Let’s start here in the City of LA–call or write your councilmember and tell him or her that you want city work done by city workers–not a bunch of freeloading freelancers. READ LA City Professionals Release a Report Highlighting Lavish Compensation Rates for Private Contractors CALL or WRITE your councilmember.