Public-Sector Workers Under Attack

[marmar]

from Dollars & Sense:



Public-Sector Workers Under Attack
It’s not about their pay and benefits—it’s about what they do.

BY GERALD FRIEDMAN


From California to Massachusetts, from Texas to Wisconsin, whether by fiat or through bargaining, state governments would balance their budgets by taking a meat ax to public employee wages, benefits, and jobs. Behind the headlines, the relative strength of public-sector unions has long made them a target for economists and conservatives hostile to all forms of working-class collective action and any regulation of the capitalist marketplace. Labor economist Leo Troy set the tone for many when he warned in 1994 of “A New Society” that was emerging, dominated by unions of public employees and a redistributive state. While market competition had beaten back the threat of private-sector unionism, public employee unions, in his view, had renewed the socialist challenge to free enterprise.

Ideologues like Troy inspired an ongoing attack on public-sector unions to defend America from socialism. When he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, for example, Bob Dole singled out the teachers’ unions for attack. While this was a great applause line, Dole lost the election. This has been the outcome of most of the right’s attack on public-sector workers and unions: applause from the far right and some of the media but little resonance among a public that generally supports public services and those who provide them.

It may be that those who would attack public employees and their unions as sponsors of incipient socialism have learned to conceal their real motives. Instead of attacking public services, they present themselves as advocates for private-sector workers and insist that they only seek to eliminate inequities between private- and public-sector workers. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie denounces public-sector unions as creating “two classes of citizens: one that receives rich health and pension benefits, and all the rest who are left to pay for them.”

It is odd to find such touching concern for equity among those who have campaigned relentlessly to widen disparities between rich and poor and between managers and workers. In any case, such equity concerns should be relieved by the growing body of empirical studies showing that public-sector workers are not overpaid compared with private-sector workers. Nor is there evidence that public-sector unions have been diverting national income towards their exorbitant salaries and staffing. State and local taxes took 9% of income in 1990 and 9% in 2007. As a share of national income, state and local employee compensation has fallen since the 1990s despite rising demands on the public sector—to improve education, repair infrastructure, clean up the environment, and provide health care to growing numbers left out of our private health care system. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/1111friedman.html

[DJ13]

1. K&R

[mysuzuki2]

2. Most private sector workers used to have much the same benefits.

When I started with the Feds in 1980, benefits were about average for employees of large companies and organizations. My father's benefits at a large co were better in fact. Over the last 30 years these things have been taken from private sector workers. The issue is not that govt benefits are so great, it's that private sector workers have been so thoroughly screwed.