I'm listening to C-SPAN discussion of whether federal workers are overpaid. It's quite a complex issue about which there is so much to say. But I don't have a lot of time, and I have other things I need to write about. So I'm going to rush through a few brief remarks, just to get them said. These paragraphs will have no continuity, nor summary. I don't have a grand point or agenda or recommendation at this point. I just had a few thoughts in a swirl.
Someone called and mentioned that when you compare workers in the federal government and workers in the private sector, at least some of it is that the workers in the private sector have had declining standards over the years. So at least one way to see the matter is that the government has held to reasonable and fair standards. I think there's a serious point there. Business does have a natural desire to squeeze the “unnecessary expenses” out, to maximize profits, and there's at least a temptation to regard worker pay as one of those unnecessary expenses.
We want government to work well. We criticize it for not doing thorough investigations of BP, for example. We want our folks in uniform to be well-supported. We need to attract the best. So why are we on a move to reduce pay and cut numbers? I'm betting there may be a goal in there somewhere to reduce oversight of what business is doing.
I hear people being whipped into a frenzy over “how come those [government] people have health care and I don't?” Why don't these people ask to get health care? Why are they so focused on keeping others from getting it. We need at least some healthy people in the country. Maybe a lot of them. It's a myth to think we don't have enough to have health care for all. Other countries do it on less money than we already spend.
The problem that the Republicans got elected on is jobs. These are jobs. They want to eliminate them. When this comes up in the next election, will the Republican spin of reduced government be the talking point? Or will it be that we reduced government by eliminating jobs?
Someone called and mentioned that the retirement benefits for government employees are way more generous than what people in the private sector get. I don't know for sure that that's still true. I'll have to research that. But there was a related point made I wanted to underscore: These people were hired on a promise that this is what they'd get. They signed a contract. And if you follow the Republican cut-back narrative carefully, they want to retroactively adjust that contract. OK, said there was no grand point, but maybe here's a minor point: Perhaps we could apply the same reasoning to CEO salaries at the bailed out companies. Yeah, they were promised something in a contract, but by this reasoning the Republicans want to apply contracts don't matter. So can we go back and modify theirs because we have buyer's remorse later when the bill comes due? I'm not saying we have to do that, I'm just saying if you can do it in one case, why not in another?
The above are all just quickly initial impressions, written stream-of-consciousness, not the result of a huge amount of thought. I'm throwing them out for conversation's sake to hear what others say while I'm off at work. I'll harvest your comments later to help evolve my thoughts. As with all topics that require thought, I reserve the right to shift my opinion as others ofter thoughtful commentary, so this is your chance to do that.
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Like the State Workers [which my husband was one] there is terrific waste: lots of no actual work, lots of 3 hr. days but getting paid for 8, lots of stolen resources, lots of bosses looking the other way, lots of unreasonable union demands. Not very sustainable.
Government workers, if you actually are there and work in that environment, is full of waste and fraud. Don't expect the private sector which is hurting drastically, to accept that as alright.
STOP THE ADVANCE OF THE 451s
Rated with hugs
Reneging on a contract can be a tough haul. I expect calling to cut workers pay is popular right now, as long as it is not your pay in the discussion.
I will believe some of the big talkers when I see the list of actual things to be cut specifically. Right now it is all ratings and popularity. Let's see what the true list is.
I want to see the defense dept at the top. Then I will know they are serious. Calling out to cut spending is easy. Making a true list is work. I don't see any work yet in the news. Just talking heads running their mouths.
(Let's keep reminding ourselves that the republicans are a minority party. There are more independents, non-aligned and democratic voters, so we are being controlled by a large MINORITY fraction of the actual electorate.)
The republicans are engaged in an ex post facto renegotiation of the contracts under which the American people have lived since the Roosevelt administration.
They want, for example, to renegotiate the rules under which Social Security operates, which negates the safety net effect of a program that has forcibly collected FICA from employers and employees since the program's inception in 1935.
This addresses the question of the relatively generousness of federal pension plans versus private pension plans.
Most Americans no longer have company funded pension plans. Those disappeared from the American landscape along with our smokestack industries.
Most Americans are employed by so-called small businesses (how anyone can call a company with 500 employees a small business is beyond my comprehension) which don't offer company paid pension plans, leaving American workers to depend upon union pension plans, individual retirement accounts, and 401(K) plans, all of which are driven by contributions by the employees themselves.
This leaves Social Security as the only guaranteed retirement program that American workers have and, since the recent financial collapse, the only one that many middle class Americans have left to them....and it's called an entitlement program because we're entitled to it....it our own money we're getting back.
The Republican agenda today is based on Ayn Rand's insane ramblings about race, class, religion, politics and economics, although they seem to forget that Rand was an outspoken atheist.
Rand's philosophy can be summed up in four words, "survival of the fittest."
Republicans don't want to take care of anyone else. Following Rand, they believe that government isn't supposed to take care of individuals in need, leaving them to the tender mercies of their families, local community efforts and, paradoxically, the religious.
It doesn't work that way in real life. People don't have the capacity to take care of the needy because, to do it right, you need one care giver for each person who needs help. Everything else is institutionalization, which inevitably results in government intervention.
Cut to 20 years later. I slowly crawled up the ladder, and eventually made a good salary with benefits. Meanwhile, most of those good factory jobs had disappeared, and with them the nice houses and snowmobiles.
And there was talk about how government workers were "overpaid." It's not so much that they are overpaid, but that many people in the private sector have been taking it in the teeth for years.
Whatever the necessity of hiring good people in government, when government workers make substantially more than employees in comparable private jobs, that's not sustainable. But the key word here is "comparable." Comparing the salary and benefits of an accountant in a $1 million a year business with the salary and benefits of an accountant in a $100 million a year agency isn't a fair comparison.
The dirtiest word in the Republican lexicon is unions. The real purpose behind all this talk is to get rid of two of the most powerful organizations resisting the oligarchy -- teacher's unions and state and local govt employee unions.
"Overpaid govt workers" is another Atwater/Rove stealth attack, in the same way as "welfare queens" was used to gut welfare and the air-traffic controllers were used to gut union power.
Are some govt employees overpaid? You betcha -- and the most overpaid are the ones Reagan and the Bushes appointed to NOT do their jobs at EPA, SEC , DoI and DoJ. We will all be paying big time for that for a very long time to come -- so why doesn't someone bring that up whenever Repugnants start screaming about wages?
Linda, see my article Hollow Support. Maybe I should have linked it from this article—I'll think about that. It's quite relevant to your remark.
Mission, it's like being a candy bar manufacturer who's trying to shrink the size of product. Sometimes people don't notice. But they notice more if the bar next to you stays the same size for the same money instead of also giving you less. The candy manufactures probably like it when everyone else moves in lockstep. I think private enterprise finds it more noticeable what they're doing when government is not doing it.
Sage, you wrote “They want, for example, to renegotiate the rules under which Social Security operates, which negates the safety net effect ...” This is a great point that goes overlooked. It's easy to see these issues as just ratcheting something down, but also sometimes they click the position like what mathematicians call a “step function” from 1 to 0, from on to off, in the sense that one day it was a safety net and one day it was not. Sometimes there is an in between, but not always. For some people it is home or no home, medicine or no medicine, food or no food, life or death. I have more posts coming on the entitlement matter, by the way, so I'll stop there for now. :)
Steve, I do think there's a legitimate beef when people can earn two pensions. It seems to me a pension is "taking care of you at the end of your life". I don't think people have two ends of life. If you go back to work for the government a second time, I think that's great. But (and I'm not talking renegotiating here, necessarily, but new contracts) I don't think people should be offered a second pension. I'm also a little iffy on a pension that is not pro-rated for people who just work a few years. I understand there are some of those around, and that seems a bit wrong, too. But we need to be careful about the contract issue. (On another day, I might revisit the contract issue, too, but my point in the article is that you have to do that fairly for every citizen, rich or poor, public or private, not just government workers because they're easy to kick around.)
Tom, I think the House's nearterm plan since they may be stymied in getting votes through is to play with budgets. I confess I'm not sure what powers, special or otherwise, the House has in that regard. But certainly if that's their plan in any way, this fits in.
Some of this goes back to the Republican idea of branding people. They just want the phrase "overpaid" in the Family Feud which politics has become to lead people to want to say "state workers" next. In part, this crowds "corporate CEOs" down to the #2 slot or lower, if they play their cards right. Some of this goes back to Gingrich's memo “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.”. Everyone should read that.
the broad middle class in America was created by the union movement, and the weakening of organized labor is one of the most important causes of its destruction
where unions prosper, the working middle class prospers, and a prosperous middle class is the first requirement of a healthy capitalist economy
Since the late 70's, the middle class has flattened out in terms of real wages. Benefits have been trashed just so you could keep a job. Union representation has gone from a high of nearly 30% of the workforce to approx 8% now. So the government job income and bennies are only good when looked at through a prism of the 2000s, job outsourcing and the Grover Nordquist-ian concept of shrinking government so you can drown it in a bathtub.
Today, the hope is to slice government so it can provide no oversight to a capitalist class run amok. The people without jobs or with jobs at WalMart or McDonalds are looking at what used to be considered 2nd class positions with the govt longingly. Their jobs are the ones that have changed and so what used to look like dog food now looks like steak. But its because they've been eating scraps for the last 2 or 3 decades.