A City Where "We Don't Want Nobody Nobody Sent"

Patronage is the most basic of all municipal conflicts of interest. It involves not only self-interest (my job), but also a variety of organizational interests (my agency, party, ethnic or racial group, friends). In every little patronage decision, all of these interests take precedence over the public interest. And yet patronage is also the most commonly practiced, and accepted, of all municipal conflicts of interest. Nowhere has patronage been practiced and accepted more than in Chicago. And yet that is where it is being prosecuted.

Patronage is often covered in the provisions of a municipality's ethics law, but it generally is not considered criminal. However, in Chicago 30 years ago, a federal court handed down what is known as the Shakman Decree, prohibiting political considerations in hiring and promotions for about 37,000 non-policy-making city jobs.

The most unfortunate aspect of many laws that try to bring unethical government activities under control is that, when they do not change the city's ethical environment, they do no more than change the rules of the game. The patronage game, once played openly on the els of Chicago, went underground. A lot of work went into covering the game up: sham job interviews, falsified job ratings, the rigging of test scores, and the destruction of files (the shredding business thrives on identity theft and ethics laws). And, as always, it was the fraudulent covering up that enabled the feds to go after the patronage managers.

Giving jobs to friends is so common that few people object to it. Much of Chicago seems to think it's okay. There weren't a lot of complaints. And anyway, who listens to people who whine about not getting a particular job or promotion. It's their own damn fault -- at least in the U.S.

But that wasn't all there was to it. Besides the covering up, there was a whole system of organizations that got a piece of the action. One nice thing is that the city's various ethnic and racial groups were included. Two bad things are that to do so, they had to do what the powers that be told them, and they had to organize by ethnicity and race. The institutionalization of a non-melting pot. What if you want a job not because you're Hispanic, but because you're a capable person? It's as if the patronage system itself were the determining factor in the city's ethical approach, that is, choosing between ends-based and rules-based ethics. The Chicago patronage system leads people to believe that as long as every group gets jobs, as long as the city works, it's good for everyone. Even if it acts in a way that would be objectionable elsewhere in life (e.g., housing, schools, etc.).

The defenses of the convicted officials are interesting. One principal defense was that the system preceded the people who were convicted. The common view, it appears, is that if you inherit a problem, you have no responsibility to even try to change it. It is a gut-level ethical position that undermines reform, that excuses people from taking responsibility for what they do, as long as they didn't invent what they do.

It accompanies another principal defense: they were just following orders, they don't have any responsibility for following the law if they are told to break it. A third defense is actually more reasonable, although perhaps not applicable here: that the officials were never trained how to follow the Shakman Decree. The lack of ethical training is often a contributing cause to unethical behavior, but it's hard to believe it was here, at least for the leaders. And it's not as if they couldn't have asked and received the training.

A fourth defense is that no one was even accused of enriching himself with taxpayers' money. This defense is the fault of years of focusing on ethical behavior directly involving money. Nearly all political scandals that don't involve sex involve money. Watergate was the big exception: a cover-up that made even stealing look decent (and there was lots of money involved there, too). The focus on money makes everything else -- the lying and cheating part of the old threesome -- appear okay.

And then there's the most popular street-level defense, which sums up the other defenses: these were nice guys who never did nothing wrong. Good individuals who do what they're told are not responsible for what they do. That is what all of us want to believe about ourselves, so why not about others? What do you say to that? Maybe they shouldn't have been so good? Maybe they should have rocked the boat, shown some moral courage? Where would that have got them? Anyway, a system like Chicago's self-selects its leaders, and even its followers. If you think patronage is a bad thing, you stay away. After all, everyone who gets a job or a promotion gets it through the system.

Only three sorts of people could have changed the system: Richard Daley, Jr., who had no reason to unless he thought he would pay for it, rather than it paying for him and his friends; a reform candidate who ran a campaign principally against the system and somehow, against all odds, by changing the way Chicagoans think about both ethics and their city government, won; and a federal prosecutor.

Will Daley be hurt by the scandal? The fact that he was guest of honor at our president's sixtieth birthday party hardly makes that seem likely. Will things change, or go even deeper underground, taking even more work away from the city's work, costing the people even more in terms of incompetent employees and time lost to political campaigns?

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired
City Ethics, Inc.