Four years after repealing most collective bargaining for most public employees, Walker and two top Republican lawmakers are seeking to: eliminate the state's civil service exams, replacing them with a résumé-based system for merit hiring; stop allowing longtime employees to avoid termination by "bumping" other workers with less seniority out of their jobs; and shorten by more than half the process for employees to appeal their dismissal or discipline.
"The process to protect merit is still there, even in the reforms you're proposing," Walker told Assembly Republicans in a half-hour meeting Thursday. "Those legitimate, merit-based protections are all completely in place, but it gets rid of some of the nonsense."
More than a century ago, good-government groups engineered the civil service system as a way to place qualified workers in taxpayer-funded jobs and weed out partisan hacks. The bill's authors, Sen. Roger Roth (R-Appleton) and Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke (R-Kaukauna), argued it's become too rigid and slow to allow the state to operate efficiently and hire the best new workers before other employers snatch them up.
