☆ What happens to a city’s workforce when services are contracted out? (3/4)
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Contracting out city work doesn’t mean employees have to lose their jobs. Often, contractors are willing to make use of city staff already in place and doing the work. So say Sandy Springs, GA, Mayor Rusty Paul and City Manager Eden Freeman in Part 3 of an Opp Now exclusive Q&A.
Opportunity Now: Wouldn’t contracting out inhouse services cause city workers to lose their jobs?
Mayor Rusty Paul: The contractor is going to want to hire a lot of our employees because they know the job.
It can be very disruptive to your workforce, but you've got to make sure that you can make that transition in a way that your current employees are part of that process, right?
ON: That's what Len Gilroy mentioned to us: a lot of times, the same staff can go straight over to work for the contractor.
RP: Yeah, we got the staff.
ON: But after bringing jobs inhouse, isn’t there a ratchet effect, making it hard to turn jobs back over to the contractors?
RP: Well, you sit down and talk with your employees, and make sure that they feel like they're going to be taken care of and they're not going to be just thrown out and abandoned.
There’s an option for them to continue to do the same job that they're doing today. They just get the paycheck from a different source. If the market gets back to that point, they're going back to where many of them came from.
ON: Does it sometimes come with a pay cut?
RP: You're not going to be able to do too much trimming. You've got to, in fact, probably create some incentives for them to stay.
City Manager Eden Freeman: When we rebid the services in 2011, one of the primary goals was the retention of incumbent staff. Now, of course, staff has the flexibility to leave at any time, but we want them to stay with us, no matter if it is a company paying their check or the City of Sandy Springs writing the check for them.
RP: But some people won't make a transition. When we tried to hire several of the private sector employees, many of them said, "No, we like working for the company we're working for. We've got a defined benefit plan, and our pensions are guaranteed. We want to stick with that."
And so not everybody that we offered positions to came. So this company, we did a pretty good job of getting the key employees that we wanted, that we needed. And I think if you set the transition up properly, putting the employees at the forefront of the transition, and having them engaged in the transition, you're much more successful.
ON: That's sort of ironic that employees in the private sector were on a defined benefit plan, and those who went into your city government would then switch to a privatized, defined contribution plan.
RP: It's about sitting down with the employees and outlining the benefits of the options. You know, if you can show that they're going to come out better in the long run and have more flexibility and more control, that's going to appeal to a lot of people.
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