PUBLIC SERVICES DELIVERY BY PUBLIC EMPLOYEES

WHEREAS, our nation's welfare is a public responsibility and solutions to serious community problems such as inadequate health care, deficient housing, unemployment, crime, pollution, drug abuse and discrimination require public sector leadership and resources; and

WHEREAS, the Reagan/Bush administrations have pursued a deliberate policy¾known as New Federalism¾to reduce the federal commitment to domestic, non-defense programs and to shift more and more responsibility for social needs to state and local governments; and

WHEREAS, excellent public services are vital to the public good and to the quality of community life and the key to excellent public services is meaningful citizen and public worker involvement; and

WHEREAS, public workers are on the front lines of service delivery every day, have demonstrated their commitment to improving the quality of community life, and are well situated to use their expertise to assist in the design of more efficient ways to deliver public services; and

WHEREAS, public employers, in an effort to cut costs, are turning to the use of temporary and casual workers and private firms in order to achieve false cost savings when bidding for public contracts; and

WHEREAS, government, by selling itself to private enterprise, is destroying the integrity of public employment and the quality of public service; and

WHEREAS, when measuring the "savings" achieved by the practice of contracting out, we must also consider the "cost" of declining quality of work, of lost accountability, of reduced investment in people, of long-term public expenses that result from service reduction, of increased corruption, of increased sex and race discrimination and of further isolating the disadvantaged; and

WHEREAS, public employers are turning to the use of prison labor as another method to cut costs; and

WHEREAS, management skeptics object to labor/management cooperation and public worker involvement in the restructuring of service delivery because of real or perceived declines in managerial prerogative, power and prestige and because they believe that workers lack the ability or desire to make sincere and pragmatic contributions to improving work; and

WHEREAS, successful labor-management cooperation results in increased job satisfaction, improved productivity and more cost-effective service delivery, the factors most often cited by the privatizers in support of contracting out:

RESOLVED, that AFT/FPE continue to oppose all policies that threaten the integrity of public employment and the provisions of quality public services, including privatization, contracting out, workfare, volunteer workers and prison labor and that the AFT/FPE continue to oppose the creation of alternative employment structures¾such as temporary workers and inequitably compensated part-time workers¾which serve to erode appropriate wage and benefit standards; and

RESOLVED, that where balance of power exists between employer and employee organizations, labor-management committees be implemented, not as a substitute for management nor an alternative to traditional union representation but as a means of promoting joint, cooperative problem solving and decision making as an alternative to privatization and contracting out and that the FPE will continue to work with others toward those ends; and

RESOLVED, that the AFT/FPE encourage and participate in efforts to improve the efficiency and the quality of public services through the restructuring of service delivery where appropriate; and

RESOLVED, that the AFT/FPE proceed with a renewed sense of purpose and direction, a set of goals, a vision of what we want society and government to be; that we carry that message forward with a vigorous public campaign to advocate effective, responsive and humane government, to promote quality public services in support of career public workers who deliver quality public services; and

RESOLVED, that the AFT/FPE call for a new partnership to be forged between the federal government and the states and localities wherein the federal government must restore its financial commitment to state and local programs and endorse policies that promote economic growth, maintain high employment and enhance productivity.