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City to Press for Easing of Civil Service Requirements By STEVEN GREENHOUSE The Bloomberg administration will call on Friday for far-reaching changes to the state’s 127-year-old civil service system governing New York City’s work force, including de-emphasizing civil service exams in hiring municipal workers. In what it calls an effort to modernize the rules governing the city’s 300,000 employees, the Bloomberg administration also wants to make it easier to lay off municipal employees outside of seniority and to end the State Civil Service Commission’s authority over the city’s hiring practices. “Some of the steps in the civil system just don’t work anymore,” said Martha K. Hirst, chairwoman of the 10-member Workforce Reform Task Force appointed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “The system has been around a long time. It’s stodgy. We wanted to find ways to get things moving and make it work better.” Several employment experts said Mr. Bloomberg’s task force was recommending the biggest changes in the state’s civil service system since it was established in 1883, when Theodore Roosevelt, then a state assemblyman, sponsored a bill that made New York the first state to establish a civil service system. The system aimed to base government hiring on merit and fitness, not on favoritism and patronage. Labor unions were quick to denounce several of the task force’s recommendations, many of which would require state legislation. Harry Nespoli, chairman of the Municipal Labor Committee, the umbrella group of unions representing city workers, said the recommendations would badly weaken civil service and seniority rules and invite far more favoritism in hiring. Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

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