Bush initiative imperils jobs of disabled
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's efforts to make government run more like a business has collided this month with a realization that, in many ways, government is not a business.
For two years, the Navy, as part of the Bush administration's initiative, has been studying whether a private contractor should take over the custodial and food services provided by 21 federal employees at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
It is one small example of Bush's "competitive sourcing" initiative, which requires hundreds of thousands of civil servants in the government to prove that they can do their work better and more cheaply than a private contractor, or risk seeing the work go to the contractor.
But in one way, the 21 workers in the hospital scullery are different: All are mentally disabled, and beneficiaries of federal policies that promote the employment of people with disabilities.
To their supporters, the administration's requirement that they compete for their jobs misses the point that government employment has been about more than the bottom line. For decades, through various policies and laws, federal agencies have gone out of their way to hire members of certain populations, from veterans and disabled people to welfare mothers and students.
"There are different goals of the federal government, and one of those goals is to get different people into real jobs," said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, who met last month with the scullery workers at the hospital, which is in his district. "And this will undercut that goal."
Bush has strongly defended "competitive sourcing," calling it one of his most important management initiatives. He said that forcing government workers to compete with private contractors for their jobs promotes government efficiency and saves taxpayer funds -- even if the jobs stay in-house. A report Oct. 3 by the Office of Management and Budget said federal agencies have identified 434,820 jobs that are ripe for such competition, of which 103,412 are being evaluated for possible contracting out.
"We are confident that the savings and service benefits expected from this effort will soon follow," Clay Johnson III, the OMB's deputy director for management, said that day.
That provides scant comfort to employees such as Devorah Shapiro, 30, who has worked at the hospital scullery for 10 years and worries about what might happen if she loses her job.
"I like working here," Shapiro said while taking a break from the first half of her eight-hour shift. "I work on the belt. I help push carts upstairs sometimes. I wash plates, pick silverware -- I do everything."
Shapiro landed the job after interning at the hospital while a student at Rock Terrace School, a public campus in Rockville, Md., that serves 112 special-needs children in grades six through 12. "I live in a group home, and I have to pay the rent there," said Shapiro. "And I have to work, or else they'll ask me to leave. I don't want to leave my friends. I don't want to leave my house. It's too nice."
The work isn't easy. The employees remove trash and utensils from used trays as they navigate across a water-slicked red-tile floor. Many wear earplugs to block out the drone of the industrial dishwasher that cleans the dishes and trays that pass through it on a conveyer belt before the workers retrieve and stack them in neat piles. Shifts begin at 5:30 a.m. and end as late as 7 p.m.
James Eastridge, 38, another former Rock Terrace student, has worked in the kitchen for 22 years. That is long enough for him to earn several promotions and enough money to buy a house in Hagerstown, Md., where he lives with his parents.
Randy Severt, a teacher at Rock Terrace, said more than 300 students have interned or worked at the hospital since the school formed a partnership with the institution in 1979. The Navy got reliable, long-serving employees for hard-to-fill positions. The students, who earn between $9.42 and $12.80 an hour, were given an opportunity to work, learn about money management, and become more self-sufficient.
Most of the scullery workers joined the hospital under a federal hiring authority that allows agencies to take on people with mental retardation as provisional employees, then convert them to permanent status after two years of satisfactory service. The government employed 1,734 mentally retarded workers in 2000, about one-tenth of 1 percent of the 1.8 million-strong federal civilian workforce, according to the Office of Personnel Management. (Overall, more than 120,000 disabled people worked for the government that year, more than 7 percent of the federal work force.)
