The Union Tribune has recently published the results of its investigation of the San Diego city payroll. (City’s payroll surged in ’08)...
The overall tone of the article is calculated to induce in the reader a sense of outrage...The newspaper strives to convey the impression that the Republican mayor of the city is unwilling or unable to slash budgets, while the unions are running amok accumulating scandalous perks for their members....The article is peppered with language that is meant to suggest a conspiracy going on behind the back of taxpayers: “What’s not usually mentioned are special negotiated payouts that are often buried deep inside dense union contracts..."
The Tribune quotes Michael Kolb, director of the National Public Employer Labor Relations Association, “They (city workers) have so many extra premiums that you can’t just look at an hourly rate.” The premiums admitted by Kolb are holidays and overtime. Is this what an extensive “investigative” report has discovered in the middle of an economic crisis?
With what intention does the Union Tribune make these arguments? The paper perhaps hopes to persuade a section of middle class people and even more backward workers to demand that city workers give up altogether “unusual benefits” that are already being eroded. In other words, the situation for working people would supposedly be better if they all conceded their overtime, paid holidays and benefits. This is the sort of political climate the paper strives to foster.
But the economic crisis was not caused by workers who cash in their vacation and work overtime. Nor will it be fixed by removing these “excesses.” The economic crisis is of a global and systemic nature.
The underlying assumption of the article, that there is something peculiarly wrong in San Diego because of the undue power and benefits of city workers, is belied by the global reach of the crisis, which is decimating jobs and services everywhere with little regard for geographic peculiarities. It is not an accident that the press is playing a similarly despicable role in the ongoing strike of the Toronto city workers (See “What is behind the media’s venomous attack on striking Toronto city workers”).
Judging by the online responses to the article, the readership of the paper seems to have responded very unfavorably to the series, and rightly so...
The capitalist class and its representatives necessarily traffic in slander and innuendos. From a rotten social position can only flow rotten arguments. But in the case of the San Diego newspaper the process is embarrassingly direct. The Union Tribune was in fact recently purchased by Platinum Equity, a merger and acquisition company. It is exactly these kinds of outfits, the finance section of the capitalist class that is most responsible for the economic crisis. The Union Tribune’s hatchet job exposes most of all, the political bankruptcy of the class it seeks to defend.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/sand-j29.shtml
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