I’m Both Management and Labor- and That Has Changed How I Think About Government Work

I occupy an interesting position in New York City government.

I am a director. I manage staff, consultants, budgets, procurements, and workloads. I have to think about productivity, vacancies, performance, technology, and whether we have enough people to accomplish what is being asked of us.

I am also a career civil servant in a union-represented title.

After more than two decades in City government, I have spent enough time on both sides of the traditional labor-management divide to conclude that we sometimes frame the relationship incorrectly.

Management isn't inherently the enemy of labor.

Labor isn't inherently the enemy of change.

And protecting employees doesn't require protecting every task, procedure or position that exists today.

Sometimes the most responsible thing management can do for employees and taxpayers is eliminate work that no longer makes sense.

I learned that lesson early in my management career.

## We Were Spending More to Collect Cell-Phone Chargebacks Than We Were Recovering

Around 2011, I inherited a process that sounds almost absurd today.

The agency had employees using government-issued cell phones under plans where calls were effectively being accounted for by usage. If an employee used a government phone for personal calls, the agency would identify the personal usage and charge the employee back.

Think about the administrative machinery required to support that.

Someone had to review usage.

Personal calls had to be identified.

Amounts had to be calculated.

Employees had to be notified.

They had to collect and reconcile money.

Records had to be maintained.

And employees had to worry about the pettiness of whether a personal call made from a work cell phone would result in a bill.

The entire process reflected the economics of an earlier generation of cellular service.

Then those economics changed.

Unlimited calling plans became available for about $32 per month.

So I looked at the process and asked a basic question:

Why are we still doing this?

We moved the phones to unlimited plans and eliminated the need to charge employees for incidental personal use.

The employee experience improved immediately.

People no longer had to worry about separating every personal minute from every business minute.

Management no longer had to police it.

And an employee no longer had to administer the chargeback process.

Most importantly, the math supported the decision.

The cost of having an employee administer the process was roughly $2,000 per month more than the chargebacks we were recovering.

We were spending more money collecting money than we were collecting.

Once the process disappeared, I cut a line item on my team.

## Then I Found Another Version of the Same Problem in Budget Reporting

Years later, I confronted a different version of the same issue.

Our organization closely tracked capital and expense spending and produced frequent reports on those budgets.

On paper, that sounds responsible.

I believe strongly in knowing where money is being spent.

But there is a difference between having financial visibility and having multiple employees manually recreate the same financial information.

We had people tracking data that already existed elsewhere.

Capital budget staff were tracking capital activity.

My unit was also maintaining its own level of detailed tracking and weekly reporting.

If we needed to review object-code spending against the larger budget, the information needed to be available.

But did two different units really need to maintain parallel versions of the same underlying information?

I didn't think so.

So we redesigned the process.

We built a tracker that updated automatically and preserved the detail we needed.

If I wanted to examine object-code expenditures against the macro budget, I still could.

If we needed to drill into a particular area, the information was there.

What disappeared was the need for employees to spend large amounts of time manually rebuilding information simply so another spreadsheet could exist.

We allowed the capital budget function to remain the primary source for capital tracking rather than duplicating the same work inside my unit.

And when a position later became vacant, I didn't replace it.

Attrition gave us the opportunity to remove the redundant function without displacing an employee.

That is an important distinction.

I didn't start with a target of eliminating a position and then search for work to remove.

I started by asking whether the work still needed to exist.

Once the work disappeared, the staffing requirement changed.

## Why Have Two Units Track the Same Data?

This is the kind of question I think government managers should ask more often.

Why do two units need to track the same information?

Why does one employee prepare a report that another employee recreates in a different format?

Why are we manually maintaining information that a system can update?

Why do we require weekly reporting if the underlying data are already available on demand?

Sometimes there is a good answer.

Different units may need independent controls.

Segregation of duties can matter.

Audit requirements can matter.

A second review can protect public money.

Redundancy can be valuable when it provides resilience or independent verification.

But redundancy should be intentional.

Bureaucratic duplication is not the same thing as internal control.

If two people are performing substantially the same tracking simply because the organization evolved that way, management should be willing to question it.

I owe taxpayers more than maintaining unnecessary work because eliminating it would be uncomfortable.

## That Doesn't Make Me Anti-Labor

I think this is where government workforce discussions often become unnecessarily ideological.

Reducing unnecessary work doesn't make someone anti-labor.

And preserving every position regardless of workload doesn't necessarily help labor.

I'm represented myself.

I value civil-service protections.

Employees should have due process. Government jobs shouldn't disappear because an executive has a personal disagreement with someone. People should not fear arbitrary dismissal.

But I also don't believe the public owes any organization permanent staffing for work that no longer needs to be performed.

Those ideas can coexist.

Protect the employee. Question the process.

And when possible, attrition can be a particularly responsible way to make organizations leaner.

If an employee retires or leaves and the workload has genuinely disappeared, government should not reflexively refill the position simply because the line exists.

Sometimes the best hiring decision is not to hire.

## I've Also Seen What Happens When a Team Gets Too Small

The reverse matters just as much.

Today, I manage a relatively small operation responsible for substantial technology procurement, budgeting, and contract work.

When a four-person team loses one employee, it has effectively lost 25 percent of its staffing capacity.

The workload doesn't decline by 25 percent.

Contracts still expire.

Procurements still have deadlines.

Invoices still arrive.

Budgets still need to be prepared.

Executives still need answers.

The strongest employees absorb more. Managers perform transactional work. Consultants fill gaps. Lower-priority work waits.

That experience has taught me something equally important:

Removing unnecessary work is not the same thing as understaffing necessary work.

Government has to become better at distinguishing between the two.

## Good Management Starts With the Work, Not the Headcount

Too many workforce conversations begin with a number.

We need five positions.

We have to cut three positions.

We need another consultant.

We need a hiring freeze.

I think the better starting point is the work itself.

What must government actually accomplish?

What work creates value?

What controls genuinely protect public money?

What tasks can be automated?

What reporting can be generated automatically?

What work is duplicated?

What should remain inside government because it requires institutional knowledge?

What requires temporary specialized expertise?

And what are we doing simply because we've always done it?

Only after answering those questions should we determine the staffing model.

That's the lesson I took from both the cell phones and the budget trackers.

In one case, the telecommunications marketplace made the administrative process obsolete.

In the other, automation and organizational clarity made duplicate tracking unnecessary.

The staffing followed the process redesign.

Not the other way around.

## The People Doing the Work Usually Know Where the Waste Is

There is another reason labor should be part of this conversation.

Employees often know exactly where the unnecessary work is.

A manager sees a five-step procedure.

The employee performing it knows there are really twelve steps, three spreadsheets, four emails, and a workaround nobody documented.

Someone knows which report nobody reads.

Someone knows which approval almost never changes an outcome.

Someone knows which spreadsheet exists only because two systems don't communicate.

Those observations aren't complaints to dismiss.

They're operational intelligence.

One of the most useful questions a manager can ask is:

“Show me how you actually do this.”

Not how the procedure manual says it works.

Show me the real process.

Then ask:

Why?

## AI Is Going to Force Government to Confront This

Artificial intelligence makes this conversation much larger.

I don't begin by asking:

How many government employees can AI replace?

I think that's the wrong question.

I begin with:

How much work are government employees doing that machines should be doing instead?

Searching documents.

Comparing submissions.

Summarizing information.

Checking for missing data.

Preparing routine correspondence.

Reconciling records.

Entering the same information multiple times.

Building reports manually from data that already exist.

Those are exactly the kinds of activities government should challenge.

If an experienced procurement or budget professional spends hours assembling information a system can generate automatically, government isn't maximizing that person's expertise.

I'd rather have that employee analyzing, negotiating, solving unusual problems, and advising decision-makers.

But AI also creates a temptation I think managers should resist.

Don't take an obsolete process and proudly automate it.

First ask whether the process should exist at all.

The best automation may be deletion.

## Efficiency Has to Produce an Actual Result

Government frequently announces efficiencies.

I think we should be more disciplined about defining what that means.

If we buy software that supposedly saves thousands of staff hours but nobody can identify what employees now do differently, I'm skeptical.

Efficiency should show up somewhere.

Faster service.

Higher capacity.

Better controls.

Reduced consultant spending.

Lower overtime.

A vacancy that doesn't need filling.

Employees redirected to higher-value work.

Or an obsolete position eliminated through attrition.

In the cell-phone example, we could identify the result.

Employees got unlimited calling.

The chargeback bureaucracy disappeared.

Government saved money.

A position was no longer necessary.

In the budget example, we still retained access to the financial information we needed.

But we stopped paying multiple units to maintain parallel versions.

Again, the staffing need changed.

That is measurable efficiency.

## Institutional Knowledge Still Matters

None of this means experienced employees are expendable.

Quite the opposite.

Sometimes someone says:

“We tried that before.”

Management can hear resistance.

But that employee may remember why the process exists.

Maybe there was an audit finding.

A system failure.

A fraud risk.

A security incident.

A fiscal-control problem.

Before eliminating a process, understand the problem it was created to solve.

Then ask whether that problem still exists.

The cell-phone chargeback policy probably made considerably more sense when every personal minute added an incremental cost to the government.

When unlimited calling became inexpensive, the underlying condition changed.

The policy outlived the problem.

Government has plenty of policies like that.

## I'm Labor. I'm Management. Ultimately, I'm a Steward of Public Resources.

I am a manager.

I am also a represented civil servant.

But the title I think matters most in this discussion is public servant.

The money we spend isn't mine.

The positions aren't mine.

The organization chart isn't mine.

They belong, in effect, to the public.

That creates an obligation.

I shouldn't preserve a position simply because another employee makes my management job easier.

I shouldn't maintain duplicate reporting because nobody wants to decide which unit should own the information.

I shouldn't ask an employee to administer a chargeback process that costs more than it recovers.

And I shouldn't eliminate a needed employee merely because a smaller headcount looks efficient on paper.

The obligation is harder than either extreme.

It is to continuously ask whether the organization is using people and money intelligently.

More than once in my career, answering that question has led me to give up a position.

Not because I valued the employee less.

Because after redesigning the work, I concluded that taxpayers shouldn't have to continue paying for a function we no longer needed.

That, to me, is part of what public-sector management is supposed to be: protect people, eliminate needless work, preserve necessary capacity, and remember whose money we're spending.