Countering Anti-Public Worker Sentiment by Amy Traub

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.drummajorinstitute.org/library/article.php?ID=7523



Delivered by Amy Traub, Director of Research, Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, at the AFL-CIO's annual state legislative issues conference on July 24, 2010.

Introduction: The Right-Wing Attack on Public Unions
I was reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page last March – and by the way, I don’t recommend that, reading the Journal editorial page: it’s enough to spoil your lunch any day of the week – but on this particular day, March 26, I almost fell out of my chair. The headline proclaimed that “America’s most privileged class are public union workers.”

You know the Wall Street Journal: this is the paper for the billionaire bankers who just got multi-million dollar bonuses after taxpayers bailed out their companies. Yet they were pushing the line that sanitation workers are more privileged than the guys running hedge funds. They were arguing that a firefighter’s ability to have a decent retirement was a threat to the country. This, from the folks who just crashed our economy. In New York City where I live, we call that chutzpah.

Of course, the Wall Street Journal wasn’t alone. Pretty soon the same anti-worker, anti-government lines I had been seeing cooked up in the right-wing think tanks, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Reason Foundation, were appearing as editorials in mainstream newspapers and on TV programs. And then politicians –- including some elected officials who had previously been friends to labor – started to find there were political advantages to echoing these lines. “Get tough on public employees!” I think they’re making a big mistake, but we’ll get to that later.

There’s a smokescreen going on here: an attempt to exploit city and state fiscal crises to promote an anti-government and anti-worker political agenda that the right wing has been nurturing for a long time. They’re doing an excellent job right now, I have to say, of deflecting attention from the real causes of our economic and fiscal problems to scapegoat public workers. It’s dangerous, and as I will discuss in a moment, it’s part of an effort to foster a race to the bottom in workplace standards and to undermine and delegitimize all unions, whether you’re in the public or private sector. But first I’d like to clear up some of the misinformation.

The big conservative talking point is that public employees earn more than private sector workers. But that’s true only if you completely ignore the context. You can’t compare a professor at the University of Louisville with someone flipping burgers at Wendy’s and argue the professor with a Ph.D. is overpaid because she’s not making minimum wage. (At least not with a straight face) Yet state and city jobs, from teaching to social work to staffing a public hospital, disproportionately demand more educated workers.

So the researchers at the Center for State and Local Government Excellence and the National Institute on Retirement Security did the smart thing: they accounted for education, experience, and other relevant workforce characteristics and found that city and state employees are paid 11 to 12 percent less than comparable private sector workers. Even when public employees' pensions and health coverage are included, their total compensation still falls behind workers in private industry. The economists at the Center for Economic and Policy Research did a similar study and arrived at a similar conclusion. Public sector workers have traditionally made less than the private sector, and they continue to do so now.

FULL article at link.

[burnsei sensei]

1. Wall Street bankers

and corporate investors are the most privileged class in America.
It is they who own the vast share of resources.
This lovely lie can be countered very easily.