State Worker Firings Up; House Speaker Tries to Make It Easier

LANSING, MI – State employees aren’t anywhere close to becoming an endangered species, but employee terminations are already on the rise — up 45 percent from the 1990s, employment officials say — as House Speaker Kevin Cotter, R-Mount Pleasant, pushes for a constitutional amendment to make it easier to fire government workers.

Four members of the state’s Civil Service Commission have issued a joint statement that criticizes Cotter’s plan, the Lansing State Journal reports.

“While most state employees do good work, those who don’t can be and are disciplined,” the statement said.

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The state workforce has already been shrunken by 30 percent in the past couple of decades, according to the statement.

Cotter said his aim isn’t to increase the number of employees fired, but would “streamline — by a bit — a lengthy and burdensome process” that in many cases allows employees to continue collecting paychecks during internal investigations.

Cotter said it shouldn’t have taken criminal charges in the Flint water crisis to fire a Department of Environmental Quality official.

That wasn’t the case, the Civil Service Commission, which said in its letter that one employee quit and the other was fired before the charges were filed.

“The implication that civil service rules required waiting for criminal investigations to suspend or discharge an employee is false,” commissioners said.

Under Cotter’s proposal, department directors and managers could fire state workers “for conduct that directly and negatively impacts the department’s ability to accomplish its statutory duties in a fair, timely, equitable and transparent manner.”

Companion legislation from state Rep. Dan Lauwers, R-Brockway Township, would establish a grievance procedure for workers who felt their discipline was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Not surprisingly, the proposal faces stiff opposition from unions.

“This is a solution looking for a problem,” Todd Tennis, a lobbyist for a union representing state supervisors and managers, said at a legislative hearing last week.

Nearly 1,600 employees were fired by Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration in his first five years in office, compared to 1,200 fired by former Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s administration during her last five years in office, according to reports from the Civil Service Commission.