Public servants feel sting of budget rancor

[alp227]

Here are two words you don't hear much lately: public servant.

More and more, when politicians talk about government employees - whether they are federal, state or local - it is with the kind of umbrage ordinarily aimed at Wall Street financiers and convenience store bandits.

"We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and the taxpayers who foot the bill are the have-nots," Wisconsin's incoming Republican Gov. Scott Walker declared this month, as he raised the idea of stripping state workers there of collective bargaining rights.

Outgoing Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who is mulling a GOP presidential bid, also sounded a class-war note last week on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal: "Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt."

That might sound like standard rhetoric from small-government Republicans. But at a time of staggering fiscal problems, Democrats, who have counted public-employee unions among their most stalwart allies, also are taking a noticeably tougher line.

New York Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo is girding for battle there, warning that state employee salaries and benefits are unsustainable at a time when the state has a $9 billion deficit.

(snip)

Three-quarters of those who were surveyed in an October Washington Post poll said they believe federal workers get better pay and benefits than people doing similar jobs outside the government, and 52 percent said government employees are overpaid.

When the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll this month sampled public opinion on the major proposals that were put forward by the president's deficit and debt reduction commission, the most popular by far - and the only one deemed "totally acceptable" by a majority of respondents - was freezing the salaries of federal employees and members of Congress for three years.

Officials of public employee unions say they have felt political wrath before, but that this time, it feels different.

"The extent and the depth of it is new. This is a concerted, deep attack on public employees and public workers," said Gerald W. McEntee, president of the 1.6-million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "The problem in the economy has not been created by public workers. It was created by Wall Street, and this political sleight of hand will do nothing to solve the problem."

(snip)

Much repeated by Republicans is an August review of Bureau of Economic Analysis data by USA Today. It showed that the average salary and benefits of federal employees had grown faster than that of private employees for nine years running, to the point where federal compensation had reached $123,049 in 2009 - more than twice the level of the average private-sector worker.

Other research suggests that once you adjust the numbers for the fact that government workers tend to be older, more educated and more experienced, they show that public employees don't do all that well in comparison.

Also complicating the equation is the fact that while government salaries are often lower than those in the private sector, benefits are often better.

The nonpartisan National Institute on Retirement Security found that, on average, total compensation is 6.8 percent less for state employees and 7.4 percent less for local employees than for comparable non-government workers.

Still others, including Andrew Biggs of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, have countered that the real bonanza for public-sector workers comes after they leave government, because of generous and secure retiree health and pension benefits.

Full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/20/AR2010122005225_pf.html

[Me.]

1. How About Andrew Setting An Example & Foregoing His 6 Figure Salary?

[LWolf]

2. Public servants are the scapegoats for neoliberal destruction. nt