reillyforchicago.com

In City Hall’s Department of Family and Support Services, the relatively small band of employees receive supervision from no less than one commissioner, 14 deputy commissioners, 4 assistant commissioners, 6 assistants to the commissioner and 17 others with the word “director” in their titles.

Budget consultants hired by city-employee unions calculate that the department has more than 200 employees in various supervisory roles and 334 “front line” workers, for a ratio of about 1.6 staff members per manager.

After weeks of remaining mostly quiet during a public relations barrage from Mayor Rahm Emanuel, labor leaders are preparing to respond with cost-saving alternatives to Mr. Emanuel’s decision to lay off as many as 625 city workers. Union officials will urge him to reduce the number of managers in Family and Support Services as well as other top-heavy departments instead of laying off their members, according to a section of the consultants’ draft report obtained last week by the Chicago News Cooperative.

“Fewer workers are actually doing the work and an excessive number of supervisors and managers are overseeing the work,” the consultants contend in the report. “We don’t need to be firing any more of the people actually doing the work — we need to get rid of the excessive number of people watching them do it.”

Leaders of the Chicago Federation of Labor, the umbrella union group that hired the budget consultants, declined to comment Friday. But the excerpt from the draft report indicates that a main thrust of the union’s counteroffensive will be a call for “eliminating unneeded midlevel management and political appointees.”

Mr. Emanuel has used similar rhetoric, although he has not made clear what he envisions as the future size of the city work force. During his campaign for mayor in February, he promised to “streamline the bureaucracy” of city government, partly by doing away with “unnecessary layers of management.” On May 17, the day after he took the oath of office, he announced plans to cut total salaries for “senior management” by 10 percent in every City Hall department, including his office.

“His responsibility is to protect the city’s taxpayers, not the city’s payroll,” a mayoral spokeswoman said Friday. “No part of that payroll is immune, including management.”

Labor activists, many City Council members and other budget watchdogs have long asserted that the administration of former Mayor Richard M. Daley, who retired this year, had too many bosses making too much money. While the total number of City Hall employees dropped during his 22 years in office, the ranks of officials with the fanciest job titles grew steadily for most of his tenure, city budget records show.

There was financing for the salaries of one commissioner, two deputy commissioners and one assistant commissioner in the Buildings Department in 1990, the first year that Mr. Daley proposed a budget. By 2008, the list of Buildings Department honchos with such titles had swelled from 4 to 14. Only the following year, after the recession began to dry up city revenue streams, did Mr. Daley move to eliminate some positions for high-level managers in the Buildings Department and other branches of his administration.

Labor officials and some elected leaders say Mr. Daley’s successor should cut much deeper.

“City government has bloat in its middle-management layers,” Alderman Brendan Reilly (42nd Ward), the vice chairman of the Council’s budget committee, said last week. “Correcting the management-employee ratio will be critical to getting our fiscal house in order.”...