Thursday, January 6, 2011

Let’s pretend that labor is the culprit and reason our budgets are short

 

The Shameful Attack on Public Employees -  Robert Reich

Reich is not an amateur self-styled political partisan who got his ideas and talking points from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book,

When it comes to labor issues, he is one of those who knows more than most what he is talking about.

And as a public employee whose pay never compared to private sector employment equal to my GI-Bill-obtained education, I agree with Reich, am offended by the assertions of conservatives who vilify public employees and challenge the honesty and integrity of those who assume they can bamboozle a gullible public. 

“… now the right is going after public employees.

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers.

They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

It’s far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public’s work - sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees – to call them “faceless bureaucrats” and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets.

The story fits better with the Republican’s Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that’s too big.

The state and federal governments led by our political heroes formally require education to many would-be public employees

How is it that you are required education beyond high school in order to get hired, but then are not paid on a par with your college classmates who opted for the private sector?

Would it not make better sense to vilify those private sector equivalents and attack their pay scale and benefits packages? Certainly there would be more money involved.

They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers. That’s untrue when you take account of level of education. Matched by education, public sector workers actually earn less than their private-sector counterparts.

The Republican trick is to compare apples with oranges — the average wage of public employees with the average wage of all private-sector employees. But only 23 percent of private-sector employees have college degrees; 48 percent of government workers do. Teachers, social workers, public lawyers who bring companies to justice, government accountants who try to make sure money is spent as it should be - all need at least four years of college.

And how does what I earn and look forward to in pension benefits compare to my peers of equal education who stayed in the private sector?

“ … They charge that public-employee pensions obligations are out of control.

Some reforms do need to be made. Loopholes that allow public sector workers to “spike” their final salaries in order to get higher annuities must be closed. And no retired public employee should be allowed to “double dip,” collecting more than one public pension.

But these are the exceptions. Most public employees don’t have generous pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45,000, the typical newly-retired public employee receives a pension of $19,000 a year. Few would call that overly generous.

And most of that $19,000 isn’t even on taxpayers’ shoulders. While they’re working, most public employees contribute a portion of their salaries into their pension plans. Taxpayers are directly responsible for only about 14 percent of public retirement benefits.”

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

“The solution is no less to slash public pensions than it is to slash private ones. It’s for all employers to fully fund their pension plans.”

Then of course as we are doing in Washington State where politicians are responding to our budget shortfall by vilifying public employees, our legislators have required that we take unpaid leaves via a furlough process every month.

That combined unpaid leave amounts to a comparative - drop in the bucket in terms of conservation of budget assets. In fact in many cases, authorized overtime to meet emergent needs in many cases offsets the saving from furlough days.

The politicians did not require such sacrifices for themselves or any other factored segment of the state economy and there is no argument that justifies the wisdom of asking public employees to accept a pay reduction month after month while asking nothing of the rest of the tax base. It was and remains the politics of cowardice.

“The final Republican canard is that bargaining rights for public employees have caused state deficits to explode. In fact there’s no relationship between states whose employees have bargaining rights and states with big deficits.

Some states that deny their employees bargaining rights - Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona, for example, are running giant deficits of over 30 percent of spending. Many that give employees bargaining rights — Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Montana — have small deficits of less than 10 percent.

Public employees should have the right to bargain for better wages and working conditions, just like all employees do. They shouldn’t have the right to strike if striking would imperil the public, but they should at least have a voice. They often know more about whether public programs are working, or how to make them work better, than political appointees who hold their offices for only a few years.”

Don’t get me wrong. When times are tough, public employees should have to make the same sacrifices as everyone else. And they are right now. Pay has been frozen for federal workers, and for many state workers across the country as well.

But isn’t it curious that when it comes to sacrifice, Republicans don’t include the richest people in America?

To the contrary, they insist the rich should sacrifice even less, enjoying even larger tax cuts that expand public-sector deficits. That means fewer public services, and even more pressure on the wages and benefits of public employees.

It does not matter how many times they read the Constitution out loud in Congress in front of God and the American public.

Politicians backed by capitalist corporate welfare lobbies (who are unabashedly and blatantly anti-labor) are not being honest in message …

… and are only pretending to act in behalf of the common good of the workers and consumers in this country.

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