A new regime in state politics is venting frustration less at Goldman Sachs executives (Governor Christie vetoed a proposed “millionaire’s tax” this year) than at unions. Newark recently laid off police officers after they refused to accept cuts, and Camden has threatened to lay off half of its officers in January.
Fred Siegel, a historian at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, has written of the “New Tammany Hall,” which he describes as the incestuous alliance between public officials and labor.
“Public unions have had no natural adversary; they give politicians political support and get good contracts back,” Mr. Siegel said. “It’s uniquely dysfunctional.”
Even if that is so, this battle comes woven with complications. Across the nation in the last two years, public workers have experienced furloughs and pay cuts. Local governments shed 212,000 jobs last year.
A raft of recent studies found that public salaries, even with benefits included, are equivalent to or lag slightly behind those of private sector workers. The Manhattan Institute, which is not terribly sympathetic to unions, studied New Jersey and concluded that teachers earned wages roughly comparable to people in the private sector with a similar education.
Benefits tend to be the sorest point. From Illinois to New Jersey, politicians have refused to pay into pension funds, creating deeper and deeper shortfalls.
In California, pension costs now crowd out spending for parks, public schools and state universities; in Illinois, spiraling pension costs threaten the state with insolvency.
And taxpayer resentment simmers.
Incestuous. Dysfunctional. This is how we have trained a generation of private sector workers who have seen nearly everything taken from them, and seen their real wages and benefits stagnate for decades, to attack public workers and their unions on sight.
In Tea Party America, teachers, firefighters, cops and city workers are held beneath contempt. Hundreds of thousands have been laid off. Hundreds of thousands more have seen their hours and benefits cut, just like the rest of us. While the real robber barons continue to shift the country's wealth to themselves, we fight over who gets the larger table scraps.
The Village media exists to protect their wealthy owners. And they have done a better job than anyone could have possibly imagined. We have tens of millions of Americans willing to strip money from their fellow working class wage earners, the people who protect our communities and teach our children, in order to cut taxes for the rich and for corporations, as record profits continue to roll in.
And when public employees are stripped and shoved out into the snow, the next attack will come upon the schools, police, and firefighters themselves. Why should taxes pay for them, will be the cry. Let's privatize them to save money. Why should people without school-aged children pay for schools? Why should people who live in the urban parts of the county pay the same taxes for fire and police protection as the exurbs?
A la carte government, privatized, corporatized, pick your provider. The hand of the free market will dispose of those who can't compete...and those who don't pay. Only one police provider authorized in the county? Pay up or else. Gotta be better than those union guys, right? One of your neighbors got robbed, protection rates for the block just went up. You get what you pay for in Tea Party America. Don't like it? Protect yourself with the Second Amendment. Libertarian utopia.
That's where all this is heading, of course. It won't stop with public employee unions. It won't until everything is for-profit, and the profits go to the top.
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