The American Scene; Job Hor: Government & Public Service

Good morning and welcome to the American scene. My name is Don Anderson. The range of jobs available in government and public service is immense. Not all of the people we are going to picture here are civil servants, but the skills they represent are in great demand. The United States government is America's biggest employer. It hired almost half a million men and women last year. Government employment at all levels, state, local, and federal is expected to grow to more than 11 million persons by 1970. By 1975 it could approach 13 million. On the federal level, specialists and professionals range through the entire scope of government activity. They work in law enforcement, conservation, public health, education, all of the sciences and engineering. They work throughout the world, representing the United States and serving the American people. But the major growth in public service is going to be on the state and local levels. The prime reasons for this are the growing population and the movement into urban areas. People are already demanding better education, health, and

welfare, better transportation, better protection, and safety. It has been estimated that within 20 years there will be some 18 ,000 local government units that will need managers and supervisors and manpower to serve 190 million people living in some 200 major metropolitan centers. The need is already here and undoubtedly will become more acute for planners, for scientists and engineers, for sociologists, for law enforcement and safety specialists, for accountants, for lawyers, for clerks and secretaries. It is clear that there are opportunities on all levels of government to work for the public in support of and with our elected officials. It is the educated, searching professional that is in demand today. Efforts are being made to recruit college students prior to graduation to enter public service. Government agencies like private employers seek excellent. Good achievement and high grades in school often mean a better salary and more

promising opportunities. Talent is in demand. Agencies and governments now realize that they must secure the competent public servant or they will not survive. To give us a better understanding of the training and opportunities of the job horizon in government and public service, I am delighted to welcome this morning, Dr. Edward M. Levine, Acting Director of the IIT Metropolitan Study Center and Associate Professor of Political Science and Dr. Charles Punean, personnel officer of the Chicago Civil Service Commission. Gentlemen, thank you for coming this morning. And on the basis of this brief introduction, why is there such a large expansion of job opportunities in government and public service? Dr. Punean, would you like to start anyway on that? That's sure. The first reason relates to what you said in your introduction, the demands for services have increased tremendously and are increasing all the time

and is also a demand for a higher level of sophistication in the services that are rendered. The problems of urban living are causing these demands and this is occurring in many different areas, many new areas such as air pollution control, the level of police protection is improving. All these demands are in many different areas are improving at the federal, state, and the local levels. Dr. Levine, as a political scientist, it's the population movement that is the prime cause of this, the growth and the movement into urban areas. It's not only this, I think it's the kind of people who live in urban areas, people whose incomes are appreciably higher than they were, say, 15, 20 years ago. And one thing I don't think that we understand generally, the whole public, is that there are services that we take for granted today, which simply didn't exist, say, 15, 20 years ago. You would certainly be more conversant with this than most of us.

And as you pointed out, the quality of the services is expected to be at a very high level with a built -in contradiction. People are not at all eager to pay taxes, yet simultaneously, all people want many kinds of services from the government and are locally resentful when these services are not delivered on time or in the quality that they expect. Well, certainly this trend is not going to change. It's most of the people in our country are going to be living in cities. This is absolutely true. If anything, it's going to accelerate over the next 10 or 15 or 20 years. And the problems are going to accelerate, too. The one problem that came to my mind, you mentioned it, but I think in terms of how it's become a problem, I suppose many urban communities today, a number of years ago, they weren't really plagued with, say, air pollution. But as more people move into these communities,

and as communities build up around them, as they inevitably do around the larger metropolitan areas, you can suddenly find yourself starkly confronted with a very serious problem. I keep wondering whether, say, in 15 or 20 years with the current population rate, that we might have that many people in a metropolitan area where it may be conceivable to think that epidemics could then set in into America for probably the first time, at least because of the recent decades, the compactness of people, precisely pollution and so forth, that naturally comes, which means that specialists are going to have to get into government, or more specialists than we have now, and work towards the solution of these problems. This is very evident on the local level, the program in air pollution control, using that same example again, has increased tremendously, has increased just this year in 1964.

The demand is for more and more technically trained people in chemical engineering and more qualified investigators to go out and check the cause for air pollution and so on. What other areas seem to be, can we predict with some safety, will become very important in the future for government to have specialists. And I suppose any of those areas that are involved with the people living close together, sociologists, law enforcement, are capable of you. Again, you're there. The same phenomenon is occurring in areas like human relations and youth welfare, as the city becomes more crowded in certain areas, problems increase in these areas, and there has to be some means of meeting these problems to understand them and try to do something about them. The problems are tremendous, and what we need are competent people to attack them. They're many competent people in government, but the need for more competent people is

really great and will increase. If this need is so great, why the shortage of people in government service? Why don't more people turn to government or public service as careers? Why do they go into private business, private industry? Of course there's a number of factors. One of which is the is the profit motive. In many cases, the private industry is able to offer a higher salary. I think that the federal government in particular is meeting this, is beginning to meet this challenge. I think that we have done something about it in the city of Chicago, and more and more governments are waking up to the realization that if you want a professional person to train, competent technician, you're going to have to pay a certain amount of money. We try to meet this challenge by conducting a salary survey each year to make sure that our salaries are competitive. This is a regular part of our personnel program. On other levels,

there is a stereotype of the government worker as being in a position which is monotonous, dreary, routine, sits at a desk all day and doesn't see the sunshine, things of that nature. How is this, this would affect people not going into this business? What is the true picture? Well, first of all, the commenting on what you just stated, the Brookings Institute just granted a survey on the impression that people have of the federal service, and it turned out to be with just these results that people regarded the federal service as monotonous and routine, and I think that you could probably say that many people have the same impression of state and local government. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. There are many, many exciting challenging positions in government at all levels, and certainly any young person that

is in high school today going into college should be considering the many possibilities that are available in government. I think that one of the reasons that we haven't done as well and recruiting, for example, is that in government, we just wait too long. We aren't trying to impress the high school person with the opportunities that are in government, but we wait until they're well along in college or even after they've gotten out of college. And by this time, the individual hasn't really had a chance to develop an interest in the public service, is not aware of the opportunities that are available. I think probably part of the problem here is that if I over generalize, I'm sorry, but I think that many people have some rather vague stereotype of what people in government do, public administration, and this is really never spelled out. And in the course of interviewing for my own research in City

Hall and in the county building in Chicago, I have seen a lot of people very active in many pursuits, and in government today, and increasingly in areas where people are needed, there is a rich opportunity to be a specialist in a whole variety of areas in economics, statistics, chemists, biologists, sociologists, and so forth. These are people who can command jobs which require competence, which are remunerative, and I think in addition to this, the people who are there have some real satisfaction in knowing that they are contributing to the welfare of the community, and using their skills in a broader, rather than in a narrower sense. Part of the problem might be that you go by a government building, and it's always large, and imposing, and big granite blocks holding it up, and you feel like you might get

lost inside of there, and you'll just become a tiny cog in a very huge wheel. Well, isn't this really true, though? I'm not criticizing you, but I think it's an impression that one would have walking past any large building, and administrative administration today, in business and in government, is pretty much the same. There are large buildings, there are large offices, hordes of people doing things to keep the operation running. That was my point, that the stereotype of being lost in the government is just as appropriate in the world of business. When you started to mention a few of the advantages of deciding on following your specialty for the government in public service, one of them being the opportunity to be of service to the public, what might some of the others be? The salary scale, evidently, is in many cases comparable to what might be achieved in private industry. Are there any other advantages

in your particular career field that you might find? Well, first of all, I think that the chances for promotion in government today are certainly great, and one of the reasons for this being that many of the people that were attracted, particularly to local government, many of the key people were attracted during the depths of depression, and these people, in many cases, are on the verge of retirement, or will very soon be ready for retirement, so that in addition to the challenge, the exciting possibilities for accomplishing something that's meaningful, there certainly are these opportunities for promotion, which will be opening up in many phases of government. Of course, there is a good deal of security. Well, this was going to be my next point. You don't have to worry about mergers, doing away with your job, city government, local government, federal and state government, are going to be around for a good long time to

come, and there is this continuity of service, and there's no question that there is more security than it would be in the normal private situation. Along these lines, the ultimate boss in any government position is, in most cases, an elected official. What is the relationship of or appointed by an elected official? What is the relationship then of the civil servant to his boss and appointed or elected official? Does this affect the continuity of his work? Does it mean that his job may be entirely different under a new boss or what? Well, of course, the whole purpose of civil service is to lend continuity to any particular activity, and this is what it accomplishes. The job still has to get done, and the civil servants of the career people who see that it gets done

is true on all levels of government. Again, I'm not just speaking for the city. So it's important for government as well, as for the individual piece of mind that civil service exists. These are the people that really make government work regardless of who is the elected official, who is the appointed official. Government can't function without the civil servant, the regular employee who stays on regardless of change in the political arena. I just like to add parenthetically here when we talk about government needs. You know, government is really a series of agencies that assists the public in one way or another or subsections of the public, and it might be just as appropriate to say that we, as the citizens of any community, need effective personnel in government. Increasingly, in many reaches, I would think particularly, this

is true, in posts where policy is made, and certainly this is just as true in certain kinds of technical areas where, for example, engineers, and as I said before, chemist or statistician is indispensable to the ongoingness of the program. What about the various levels of government employment? You have city, you have county, you have state, federal. How do these relate one to another? An interesting fact to me was in the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway that a segment was constructed by the city and by the county and by the state. How do these levels of government relate to each other? I suppose you're asking me that. Well, that's a terribly complex thing to discuss, meaningfully, because it depends on the decision of the local government to engage in a project, whether enabling legislation is on hand, whether

it has the finances. So many prerequisites before it can negotiate with the state and federal governments. Well, I didn't mean to be that specific about the Dan Ryan Expressway. Well, I mean, any highway that has, let us say, divided responsibility, federal, state and local, the federal government has taken over the responsibility because of the financial burden involved in many areas, the expressways across the country. I'm not quite sure I understand your question here. The relationship that I'm wondering whether it exists and how much it exists would be the cooperation or the working together of these various levels of government for common problems, for instance, cities that are next to each other are share common problems. The city is within a county. Are you talking about inter -urban or inter -level? Inter -level and inter -urban. Well, for example, Chicago can't, as a city, work with

Indiana. You have to have inter -state compacts. These must be agreed upon by the legislatures in the two states and then approved by the Congress. Inter -urban problems can be resolved with far less red tape involved. I guess what I'm really driving at is a person working for the government would not be faced with a very, very narrow problem limited only by the boundaries of his city or so forth, that these things are related to all levels of government, to all decisions that he is really cooperating with with government on a large. Well, some are, but some are not. For example, where you place your traffic lights and your stop signs is not a problem of any other city, really, but yours, however, if you examine the urban areas today, the way they're expanding, and many of them, particularly like

Chicago, really being the hub of the complex which sprawls across state boundaries, then you do have this problem. Traffic, for example, increasingly, I think, sewage disposal, air pollution, population trends in these areas that you said would be growing in the future. Sure. These are certainly the basic areas. Related to the question that you asked, Chicago passed air pollution control ordinance, but an air pollution control ordinance can't stop at city boundaries, so the mayor had asked many of calling many of the suburban mayors and tried to get the suburbs to enact a similar ordinance, so that the same control would exist on both sides of the line. And of course, many of the suburbs have enacted virtually the same ordinance as Chicago, so that there is a feeling of cooperation where there is a mutual problem. And that points up the growing complexity of all of this that it's impossible for one man or a few men to

understand the problem now, that we're going to have to have more and more men working on this problem because it is growing. It's just as naturally as the cities grow, the problems are going to grow. Well, how do we go about getting qualified people for these essential government jobs? What kind of training is involved or needed? Well, at IIT in the Metropolitan Study Center, we have an educational program at the undergraduate level for students who are taking a major in a regular departmental program. The center's program is a minor area, and it's very broadly interdepartmental, that is it brings together courses from economics, sociology, engineering, technical drawing, architecture planning, history, political science, public administration, and did I say sociology? Our object is to utilize these courses, these areas, because they are basically related to various

aspects, the major aspects of certain of these sprawling problems, and to equip students who are going into either the government or indeed private organizations, or who are simply going to be afflicted with the problems as citizens in particular communities, so that they are better prepared to deal with these, for example, moving into government and being somewhat familiar with the problem. Understanding the problem, say a civil engineer has, makes it much easier for say an economist or a political scientist to deal with him, to help him work out the problems he has, to be more sympathetic to his responsibilities, and this I think also makes or increases the opportunity for more thoughtful, more effective, special project planning in order to, let us say, keep the city continually revitalized. So the need is for a specialist, but with an understanding of other areas that are at

play within his specialty or that play upon him? I think there's also a need for generalists too, but the kind of program that Ed is describing certainly would be useful in many, many areas of government. This probably would be on the higher decision making level, is that true? Well, I wouldn't restrict it just to that level. I think that this fits in very nicely with the increased emphasis that the government at all levels is placing on training and the development of individuals for more and more responsibility, and you have to start this down at a relatively low level as the person grows and develops in the job, and these kinds of programs that have been developed that only take another Chicago University's, I think, are going to be very helpful to the government. One thing I wanted to ask you, wouldn't you say it would be kind of appropriate to suggest something like this that we're dealing with human behavior and human

problems, and increasingly we really need people with college educations to cope with these problems, and they're not doing something inside something called government. They're working with particular phases of community life, and therefore I think they've got to know something about the people with whom they're dealing how they live, their attitudes, what they want, the whole complex that any kind of community can provide, they've got to be able to talk to them sympathetically, intelligently, and to relate this information to the other areas in government, and in the communities that impinge upon whatever kind of decision would be made. Well, I would certainly agree with that the kinds of persons that we're talking about just have to understand the problems of the city better. And this is this kind of program, I think, will help do that. A person who was trained as an engineer, as a civil engineer,

more than likely, in most, well, not most, but in some schools, would have a minimum of sociology courses, political science courses, and so forth, and yet this has been the pool that has been tapped for government work, and the understanding of problems of government work. This has been especially true of city managers, and since our program is designed also to train students for careers in city management, we think we have a very encouraging working relationship with the engineers, because our students will be exposed to the civil engineers' perspective, not as specialists, but to see what they have to deal with. Simultaneously, the civil engineering students interested in dealing with people, rather than with draft boards, are able to take advantage of the programs substantially broad curriculum, taking field trips, doing research papers, and seeing, in fact, what government is about, and what human problems are actually like, you know, not on a piece of paper,

talking to people and finding out exactly how they feel. What about training within the government, once you are in a department or a position in government? Are there training programs there for further development and advancement? Well, this is, as I think I stated before, is an increasing area of importance to government. The federal government has gotten into training in a very large way. This is something that's a great concern to the city of Chicago. There's an awful lot of talent in government already, a lot of competent people, and it's behooves government to get as much out of these people as possible, to develop them to their maximum capability. Not only the civil will do better at their present jobs, so that they can look forward to more responsibility in a job after another promotion. Is it fair to say that there that almost any profession job career is available within the government? It's very close to that, if you can't. In other words, that

no room for tennis players, recreational specialists. So in other words, that no matter what career interest you have, there is a place more than likely in government service and public service, and that there may be some very decided advantages for entering government and public service. This is true. I believe this very strongly. The advice to young people considering careers would be don't ignore government. I would put it even more positively, give it thoughtful consideration. There are rich opportunities here, and incidentally there is, as I'm sure we all know, a certain degree of interchange between people in government and business, and certainly many people in government work with, must be aware of the problems and the situation of particular business organizations. After all, the refurbishment of the loop, I think is irrefutable evidence of this. Well, I think this has been very

interesting, gentlemen, that we've broken down several stereotypes here about working for the government in public service. It's not you're not closing your eyes when you enter the government. They don't break down at ease. Well, I want to thank you very much for joining us this morning, Dr. Edward M. Levine of IIT and Dr. Charles Poonium of the Chicago Civil Service Commission, and this is Don Anderson saying good morning for the American scene.