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PRINCIPLE TWO: Treat Front-Line Public Employees and Their Unions as Resources and Partners in Service Delivery

In the last few years successful corporations such as Saturn, Xerox, Levi Strauss and Corning have learned a basic lesson: treat front-line workers and their unions as partners for change rather than costs to be controlled. Let them participate in product development, management decisions and quality improvement. Build a work team dedicated to quality rather than a shop floor resigned to punching the time clock. The results have been remarkable: consumers get better products, workers get respect and the company makes more money.

Apply this same lesson to the public sector and the result would be similar: improved public services and more cost-effective use of tax dollars. It's not that elected officials don't recognize the resource they have in their workers. As New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman put it, "I have found in my time of state service to look to the public sector-those are the people who do all the work. They know how government works, and they have suggestions." Indeed, when state officials in Texas and Washington asked for suggestions on how to improve government services, the vast majority of new ideas came from public employees.

The question is whether elected officials are prepared to institutionalize a partnership with workers and unions, much the way Ohio did when the public employees' union and the state wrote partnership and quality principles into their collective bargaining agreement. Just as unions have expressed a willingness to bend on civil service classifications and rules, government managers and elected officials must be willing to accept greater worker involvement in designing and developing public services.

The new partnership model is predicated on the view that management is not solely the prerogative of managers, that teamwork is built on a consensus and cooperation that includes front-line workers. It is built on the idea that employees and their unions share as strong a commitment to delivering high quality public services as managers do.

The Xerox model is instructive: the company gives union officials internal financial documents and teaches them statistics in the same courses managers attend. If the old way of defining quality and making decisions is to submit to the manager's point of view, the new way is to involve the workers who deal with the public every day and understand first-hand how a service is carried out. If the old way is to provide workers with only enough information to carry out a narrowly defined task, the new way is to engage the workforce in developing and implementing the organization's goals and priorities.

The equation is simple: the more front-line workers are included in the decision process, the more public services will improve.

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