New York patronage civil service produced gross pay inequity and rigged exams

Evidence

Under such a system, civil service was chaos. Offices were filled with so many clerks and secretaries that supervisors couldn’t possibly provide work for all of them. One secretary might be receiving 25 a week. The secretary at the desk next to hers, doing identical work, might be receiving 47 a week. Some city typists were getting 1,200 a year. Others were getting 4,000. When giving tests of the ring-the-gong variety to candidates for jobs requiring physical strength—lifeguard or fireman, for example—the examiner painted over the candidate’s side of the dial which registered the force with which the gong was struck, so that only the examiner could see the results, and the results the examiner reported frequently had a relationship less to strength than to amount—the amount of money the candidate pressed into his hand. More than 1,200 employees had been exempted from any competitive examination at all. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 301

Categorization

• SEED: The rigged strength-test dial is a vivid concrete mechanism — an angle on how fraud is engineered at the point of measurement, worth an essay on corruptible testing design.
• CANDY: The examiner painting over the gong dial so only he could read results, then reporting what candidates paid him, is a darkly comic standalone anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Dismissals coincided with patronage hires bypassing competitive civil service exams — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 805; Political patronage threatened to erode civil service stability and guarantees; Patronage appointments to top civil service posts risked politicizing the service permanently — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 806 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Dismissals coincided with patronage hires bypassing competitive civil service exams #corroborates (0.90) — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 805
• Patronage salaries paid far above comparable private industry work #exemplifies (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 1452
• Tammany political bosses gutted New York civil service reform under Hylan #corroborates (0.82) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 372
• Political patronage threatened to erode civil service stability and guarantees #expands (0.75)
• Patronage appointments to top civil service posts risked politicizing the service permanently #complicates (0.72) — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 806