A court-appointed monitor of Illinois’ state government hiring practices has pushed back on Gov. JB Pritzker's attempt to pull the plug on federal courts’ oversight of state hiring, saying Illinois’ government agencies have a long way to go before the governor can claim the state has reformed itself.
On Sept. 15, attorney Noelle C. Brennan, in her role as court-appointed special master to monitor and review state hiring practices, filed a brief in Chicago federal court.
“The mere existence of … laws and policies did not prevent the illegal behavior and there is no reason to believe these same laws and policies will prevent future recurrences,” Brennan wrote in the brief.
“Although (the Illinois Department of Transportation) and the State have made significant strides towards reforming their employment practices, there is more work to be done.”
Brennan filed the brief in response to a motion filed in July by the Illinois Attorney General’s office, representing Pritzker.
In his filing, Pritzker asserted the facts and conditions that led to the court-ordered oversight – including the state’s infamously patronage-ridden hiring practices - “no longer exist” and the federal courts can no longer “justify the extraordinary intrusion … into sovereign State affairs.”
The court orders were first issued in 1972, three years after Chicago lawyers Michael Shakman and Paul Lurie sued the Cook County Democratic Party to fight patronage. That suit led to the so-called Shakman Decrees, federal court orders which bar Illinois government from using politics to determine who gets hired and promoted in government jobs in Cook County and Springfield.
In February, Brennan filed a report in which she noted work had started toward a comprehensive employment plan for state government. However, last fall, Brennan reported the state had failed to put together rules and guidelines to “address certain current systemic practices that are vulnerable to manipulation” or which could violate the Shakman decrees.
Further, Brennan asserted Pritzker’s office had restricted communication between the special master’s team and various state hiring agencies and offices.
She asked U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang to broaden the scope of her watchdog authority.
In reply, Pritzker asked the judge to not only reject Brennan’s request, but to abolish the Shakman Decree over state government altogether.
In her 68-page reply to Pritzker’s efforts to lift federal court oversight, Brennan said such a move would come far too soon in the reform process.
She noted the state continues to allow many of the practices that were ongoing when she began her oversight role.
These include:
- Refusing to set minimum job requirements for open positions, or making the minimum requirements intentionally vague, to allow hiring officers to interpret them as they please;
- Manipulating the hiring process to ensure only certain candidates proceed, or ignoring hiring policies altogether, overriding objections from the special master, to advance certain favored candidates;
- Slow walking reforms to processes designed to limit hiring pools to only current or former state employees;
- Giving current workers “temporary assignments” or interim promotions, to grant those current workers an advantage over other candidates, by giving them “experience,” or to allow them to simply work in positions that should otherwise be opened up to other candidates;
- Labeling certain positions as “technical” to allow for more leeway in escaping review: or
- Outright ignoring policies and procedures established to reform hiring practices.
While the state has established procedures for job applicants and others to file complaints about state hiring abuses, there is no mechanism or ability to make those complaints public.
And, she said, before the state’s reforms can be considered complete, “there must be consequences for failing to adhere” to policies.
“… There are a number of structural and systemic deficiencies in the State’s employment practices that increase the likelihood of manipulation of the process,” Brennan said. “These deficiencies have been used in the past to favor politically connected candidates and exclude large swathes of Illinois residents from consideration for State employment.
“Although the State is seeking to rectify some of these deficiencies, many of the proposed reforms have not been fully implemented. In other instances, the proposed reforms are not sufficient to address the breadth and scope of the problems or have not been in place long enough to fully assess their effectiveness.”