Here’s one who sucked at the government’s teat for nearly 40 years! What an a$$hole. Clearly, we need more productive, private-sector workers, like corporate lobbyists and hedge fund managers. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Commenter Shaz yesterday linked to this post at Gin and Tacos, which suggests that we apply the same incentives to all public employees that are being tested on educators these days:
1. A pending bill proposes a performance-based pay system for police officers throughout the Sunshine State. If the crime rate fails to improve based on rolling three-year averages, officers can be fired. They’ll all be working on year-to-year contracts without seniority benefits. Bonuses will be paid to officers who make the most arrests. Legislators believe that the new merit-based rules will encourage officers to follow the law scrupulously and suppress the crime rate for which police are responsible.
2. A proposed Senate bill will create an incentive-based salary structure for trash collectors. Since landfill space is an unwelcome expense (and rapidly diminishing resource) for municipal governments, the new rules will reward garbage men for completing their routes while using the least possible landfill volume. State Republicans believe that the law will encourage waste disposal workers to innovate and develop new means of reducing the volume of trash generated by Floridians.
3. Two radical new laws are experimenting with ways of altering the compensation structure of state firefighters. One plan, soon to be implemented in a pilot program in Bradenton, will pay firefighters for each fire they extinguish. Logically, rewarding firefighters for each fire they put out will ensure diligent work with no conceivable negative impact on the number of fires that occur. A separate program (currently testing in Opa-Locka) takes a different approach, terminating the contracts of firefighters who allow buildings to burn down or for fatalities to occur in fires. This makes sense, as firefighters are ultimately the people who control outcomes in this area.
Historiann 
What is going on in this country?
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Brilliant!
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A truly excellent post. I’m only puzzled at why Florida nurses seem to be getting a pass — shouldn’t we track how many patients are getting better vs. dying on their shifts, and reward or penalize them accordingly? And think of the money that counties and municipalities could save if we hired non-union contract labor for more mundane tasks like inserting foley catheters?
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What would a state want to incentivize nurses to do? Preserving life is after all more expensive than ushering in death. I think the “pro-life,” anti-“death panel” Republicans have left nurses alone precisely because they don’t know what they really want them to do (except to work for the lowest wages possible, of course.)
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Don’t show that to our governor, I’m fairly sure ze will think they’re brilliant ideas and our state legislature WILL vote to implement them. And I *like* having my waste disposed of in a landfill instead of hidden somewhere.
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I’m pretty sure those ideas were hidden somewhere in the infamous budget bill that legislators didn’t bother to read before voting on.
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What is less funny is that all these ideas will soon become reality. In short, slavery is knocking at the door.
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Well, KoshemBos, we aren’t called public servants for nothing.
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HA-ha. Good one, Notorious.
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We should all Tweet this post everywhere, or something, it’s really important.
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Nothing much to add to the comments here. To read through the litany of anti-worker, and really, anti-American, screeds and proposals in just today’s issue of the New York Times alone–coming from a certain needless to be named segment of the nation’s political class–is truly to be stupefied. But that was a genuinely touching tribute in the first link above, for which, thanks.
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In memory of Molly Palsgrove Davis, and in honor of the thousands of Ohio teachers who lost their collective-bargaining rights last week, thank you, Historiann!
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Thanks for the link to that wonderful tribute. I am proud to be an educator, and to come from a family with a tradition of working in public schools and now state universities. I hope that the tradition of public service embodied by Molly Palsgrove Davis can continue in the face of current difficulties. I hope my own contribution can measure up to hers.
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In reply to Notorious, hospitals now do exactly that. With computerizing of records, they can measure how patients perform under every staff member, and use these metrics to make personnel decisions. They also are trying to outsource more jobs to lower-wage or subcontracted personnel, like janitorial, clerical, bookkeeping, and cafeteria functions.
The measurement of nurses (and doctors) output is doable with computers, because they allow the necessary statistics to be done easily. Each patient may be under the care of four doctors and fifteen nurses over a two-day stay, but by crunching the numbers of who is on shift and comparing them to other staff with similar positions, they assign nurses and doctors to retraining or promotion, depending on the results.
— NPH
(Note: the info above comes from a good friend of mine who works at a nurse at a large VA hospital.)
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