Those who found interest in Joseph Coletti?s John Locke Foundation 2008 report detailing ?taxpayer return on investment? ? basically a fancy-pants way of saying ?bang for the buck? ? might be intrigued by a new TIME article focusing on the importance of improving public workers? productivity:
If we seize upon this crisis to make basic changes–to start rewarding public employees in part on the basis of how effective they are, for example–we could do more than just stabilize our budgets; we could raise our entire economy.
For now, the efficiency gap between the public and private sectors is holding us all back. The U.S. ranked 68th (out of 139 countries) in terms of wastefulness of government spending in the 2010-11 World Economic Forum report on global competitiveness. Experts put our public-sector productivity about 10 years behind that of the rest of our workforce. If public workers could halve that gap, the annual savings would ring in at $100 billion to $300 billion, according to a new study by the McKinsey Global Institute. That would mean the equivalent of a recurring stimulus package every three to eight years.
“The choice of cut more or tax more is not acceptable. You have to do it better,” says Lenny Mendonca, a McKinsey senior partner who has spent 20 years analyzing productivity. “Right now, the conversation is all about the near-term cuts. But over the long term, the only way out of this is massive productivity improvement.”
Cuts must be made, particularly to unsustainable pensions, but seeing them through the lens of productivity looks very different from slashing and burning through with the blinders of ideology on. Washington state senator Rodney Tom has introduced a bill to require school districts to make necessary teacher layoffs based on performance ratings, as opposed to by seniority alone. That’s reform based on results.
