Like the scary rumbles that shake the floor and buckle the pavement following an earthquake, the aftershocks of the continuing federal investigation of massive fraud in city hiring have left City Hall workers at every level–from department heads to lowly clerks–searching for firm footing.
To put it another way: They’re worried about their jobs.
“Everybody is looking over their shoulder,” said Ald. Bernard Stone (50th). “Every department head is sitting, quivering. Not so much that they did wrong. They’re afraid of being touched by the scandal,” said Stone. “There’s this aura of gloom and doom that’s around the place,” said Stone, a staunch supporter of Mayor Richard Daley and a 32-year veteran of the City Council.
“I’ve never seen it like this,” said a lobbyist who works closely with the top rung at City Hall. “People don’t know who to trust,” he said. Like most of those interviewed, he declined to be identified by name.
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This sense of wariness and unease is especially evident among mid- and low-level employees on the City Hall work roster. “It may hit your boss. Or it might hit your boss’ boss and it might hit you eventually,” said a woman who staffs the front desk of one city department. “It does affect me because it trickles down.”
“It’s unrest,” she said, despite the fact that she had no clout when she got her job a few years ago. To apply for a position, “I actually stood in line,” she said.
Ron Huberman, Daley’s chief of staff, has said he plans a reorganization of the city’s so-called “infrastructure” departments–Water Management, Streets and Sanitation and Transportation–all of which have figured prominently on the Richter scale of City Hall scandal.
Worried workers
In those departments, “a lot of people are wondering what it means for them personally, and the departments in general,” and there is a sense of “uncertainty,” said a midlevel staffer at Transportation, where Commissioner Miguel d’Escoto resigned under pressure last month.
“Unquestioned conventional wisdom is turned on its head overnight,” said Ald. Joe Moore (49th). “One is the conventional wisdom that the mayor would be mayor for life. And he is now seen to be a mere mortal like the rest of us.”
Ever since federal prosecutors charged last week that two Daley administration officials illegally rewarded campaign workers with city jobs, the cashier at a sandwich shop catering to rank-and-file city employees says many of her patrons have been under orders to restrict their coffee and lunch breaks and scurry quickly back to their desks.
“Like they’re on lockdown,” she said, using a prison analogy. “You know, they’re worried about their jobs.”
“I’ve been talking to my colleagues and the biggest question is who’s in charge,” said Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd). “A lot of the commissioners have walked out, resigned, been pushed out. These are some of the departments that have the most impact on our city’s day-to-day operations” said Munoz.
Since May, five department heads have resigned or been fired, as have the city’s inspector general, Daley’s chief of staff and the head of his Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
“Everyone is waiting for the next shoe to drop,” said Munoz. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen next. Not necessarily about who’s going to get indicted but what’s going to happen. Tension and anxiety are two very good words to describe what’s going on at City Hall these days,” he said.
Many recently named acting department heads are “running things by the seat of their pants. They’re feeling overwhelmed, being thrust into what can best be described as a chaotic situation,” said Moore. “In the short term it’s going to result in a reduction in the delivery of city services. … The Department of Transportation, for example, has been and continues to be in total disarray, ” said Moore.
“Everybody is cautious,” said a city staffer who is part of the political organization of a North Side alderman. “Everybody is going to step back” for fear of doing something wrong. “It is going to slow operations. … There are people who are just frozen by this. The reaction is really one of `shock and awe.'”There was some feeling at City Hall that federal prosecutors were wrongly creating a criminal case out of potential violations of the Shakman civil consent decree. That long-standing federal court order prohibits political hiring, promotions and firing for all but about 1,000 policymaking positions among the 38,000 city jobs.
Prosecutors outlined their allegations in mail fraud complaints against Daley family friend and patronage chief Robert Sorich and another official close to the Daley family and its 11th Ward Democratic Organization, Patrick Slattery.
As part of the “massive fraud” designed to reward the politically connected, prosecutors say, one city employee who was on active duty in Iraq at the time was given a promotion after documents were altered to show he had won a top grade in an interview that never took place.
In another case, the system allegedly was greased for a worker who died before he could be promoted, prosecutors charged.
An employee in the Department of Construction and Permits ridiculed federal prosecutors’ contention that there is something criminal about hiring applicants favored by politicians and union officials. “They want you to hire your enemies,” he complained.
“Everyone’s running around scared. The guys who have the clout are worried their clout’s going. … They’re scared if they lose their clout they lose their spot,” explained one veteran city worker who ran out of clout long ago, Frank Coconate.
Coconate, a 27-year veteran with the city Water Management Department and an outspoken critic of the mayor, is fighting a move to fire him on charges he lied about his whereabouts when he insists he was at his city job.
Even if they’re not fired, said Coconate, his former co-workers are worried about being moved from their cushy “spots” near their homes where they don’t have to work hard to an unappealing job requiring a long commute and a solid day’s work.
Taking precautions
In fact, most workers are so eager to maintain low profiles that they no longer gather in hallways or bathrooms to chat and certainly not to laugh or gossip where they might be seen by frightened supervisors or any of the cooperating witnesses in the ongoing federal probe.
The sense of gloom was not a universal sentiment. The spotlight on the Hispanic Democratic Organization, a pro-Daley political group that has scores of members on the city payroll, has been a welcome development, said a city truck driver who works at Midway Airport and who said he has seen HDO-connected employees prosper at the expense of others.
“A lot of people are happy” about the HDO revelations, he said. “If you wanted to get anything done in the city, you had to go through HDO. If you wanted to get somebody on the job, you had to go through HDO. You wanted to make a move, you go through HDO.”
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More representative, however, was a worker standing outside City Hall who said that being a city employee is “like the weather.” He then pointed to a sky that was gray and threatening.
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