Just how long has a Hadley man been pushing for greater transparency about state job vacancies? Well, it has been 21 years – back before the notion of “transparency” become a buzzword among office-holders.
But Thomas J. McGee’s failure as an ordinary citizen to get the Legislature to make it a law to list job openings suggests some in the Statehouse prefer obscurity to openness.
McGee, a retired federal government employee, isn’t the type to give up. He sees it as a matter of fairness: Everyone looking for work in Massachusetts should be aware of openings in state government. While official hiring guidelines already call for job postings to ensure an “open, fair and transparent hiring process,” agencies routinely obtain waivers from that.
A spot check by the Gazette and Amherst Bulletin found high-level jobs in the Executive Office of Health and Human Services and the Division of Professional Licensure were recently filled without having been posted.
Two decades ago, McGee allied with former state Rep. Nancy Flavin, at the time his district representative, to secure mandatory job-posting, back in the dawn of the Internet era.
Today, after many failed attempts to bring this simple idea forward in the Legislature, state Rep. John Scibak is the bill’s sponsor.
Make no mistake. This isn’t a case of a courteous lawmaker advancing a constituent’s pet project. Scibak believes this measure, while it has died many times in committee, holds merit.
In this session, the bill has secured a favorable recommendation from the Joint Committee on Labor of Workforce Development, which Scibak chairs. Two years ago, before becoming Senate president, Stanley C. Rosenberg sponsored the measure in his chamber and argued its merits in a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee leader.
Rosenberg’s backing wasn’t enough, which hints at how deep – and covert – are the roots of legislative objection to open government.
Rosenberg’s logic in favor of the legislation was sound then and now. “Ultimately having a larger and more competitive field of candidates to draw upon only benefits our state by ensuring that our workforce is composed of highly qualified individuals,” Rosenberg wrote.
Without a law like this, it is highly connected individuals who land choice jobs.
They may be highly qualified as well, but that’s not the point. Everyone should know about job vacancies in government.
In a system that still operates to some degree on patronage, job openings are the coins of the realm, and that, we suspect, is why news of them can fail to reach the public. Politically connected people want to use them to reward supporters.
McGee says he hoped that the highly publicized patronage scandal involving the state Probation Department would have illustrated the merits of the proposed law and disarmed its opponents.
But time will tell whether entrenched – and unvoiced – interests in the Legislature block this measure once again. Scibak says he has made it clear to the House speaker that this is one of his priorities.
If it dies again in committee, we’ll view that as transparent evidence that the system’s first priority is to take care of its own.
