ABSTRACT
Students who have completed the preceding five exercises may have come away with the impression that public personnel administration is an activity dominated by white-collar managers in business suits who, after careful and dispassionate analysis, issue edicts that determine the shape and structure of an organization’s personnel system. Although there is perhaps some truth to this picture, there is considerably less now than there was before the 1960s. Public personnel management is typically no longer unilateral management. That is, no longer (or at least less often) can personnel managers simply write rules and regulations, set compensation levels, or make other significant decisions that affect public employees without considerable consultation with those employees. The extent of such consultation varies widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, to be sure. But as a general rule, public workers across the nation have organized into unions or associations and negotiate working conditions with school boards, city and state governments, and other public employers. The decade beginning in 2010 has seen some political and legal efforts to limit unions, but public employee organizations have not gone away. Where necessary, they have shifted their tactics and their focus.
