Opinion | Michigan's government could use a lesson on workforce deployment

There are benefits to having worked in business when serving in public office. Understanding and implementing management concepts and tools, like reallocating resources to meet need, is one of them. It is a lesson our governor, her attorney general, and their teams could have used.

This week, they announced a 10-day layoff of roughly 3,000 people combined in their offices because of a reduced workload. Yet, my office is fielding hundreds of calls and has dozens of open cases from desperate citizens who can’t access or get answers from our Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA). And my office is just one of 148 in the state Legislature experiencing the same thing.

Instead of laying people off, why not assign them to the UIA? What about employees of the Secretary of State and other departments that are closed or have significantly reduced hours? Granted, perhaps not all these people could have been reassigned instead of laid off, but perhaps some could – and might have welcomed the activity and usefulness.

Instead, in the last few weeks, we have added hundreds of NEW employees at UIA to answer phones. That’s hundreds of NEW salaries and all the time and cost it takes to train help that is going to be there only temporarily.

This was an opportunity for creative management and problem-solving; instead, the “solution” was to spend more taxpayer dollars -- and on the backs of people who are going to struggle to pay a penny in taxes let alone the rent or mortgage.

In business, if you have workers dedicated to a certain product and the demand for that product wanes, when possible you reallocate to a product for which there’s demand. If people on one team see that another group is struggling to keep up, they move from their task to help the other -- they don’t go home only to be replaced by a temporary team. This is not just efficient and smart; it is humane and it gives people the opportunity to be part of the solution. Otherwise, it’s like bringing in an untrained defensive line instead of giving your own proven players a chance to win the game.

I am hoping the governor and her team exhausted all opportunities to use existing resources before they decided to idle workers and hire new. The governor’s decisions to put entire industries on ice, confine people to their homes, and regulate what we do and when we do it, are putting us billions of dollars in the hole and violating the very freedoms we are ensured by the Constitution. It’s our responsibility to taxpayers to take every step we can to mitigate the damage.