Union-negotiated merit rules reward volume and seniority, not quality of client interaction.

Evidence

The new street-level bureaucrat needs rewards for effective performance. Currently professional associations and public employee unions discourage performance rewards based upon “soft” evaluative measures. They prefer so-called merit increases only where the majority of members have easy access to achieving the rewards. The lockstep of advancement in civil service systems must begin to yield to assessments of ability based on recognizing not only the volume of work but also the appropriateness of response and quality of the interaction with clients. In tum, this will mean seeking out and crediting citizen reports on street-level workers (with due recognition of potential bias, as is the case of all assessments). It will also mean development of peer assessments in the provision of services and worker contributions to determining assessment criteria. Above all it will mean developing ongoing consultative interactions of workers and supervisors to provide systematic qualitative evaluations of case handling. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1488

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how the institutional incentives of public-sector unions and civil-service lockstep structurally prevent evaluation of the interactional quality of frontline work — the administrative machinery that keeps discretion unmeasured.
• DEFINE: Clarifies what counts as an ‘effective performance reward’ in street-level work: appropriateness of response and quality of client interaction, not just case volume.
• XREF: Connects to the institutionalist literature on how professional associations and civil service systems reproduce practice norms independent of formal policy.