Public Workers Facing Outrage as Budget Crises GrowA quick look and I thought: "Hooray! Finally pushback against the coast-to-coast ghouls demanding privatization of everything is getting some serious coverage. Maybe 2011 will turn into 1848. Maybe the workers of Greece and Ireland and France have had an effect." I figured the outrage they were facing was their own internal outrage, caused by the demonizing of everything public and communal in this increasingly sociopathic "society."
Then I clicked on the story.
Ever since Marie Corfield’s confrontation with Gov. Chris Christie this fall over the state’s education cuts became a YouTube classic, she has received a stream of vituperative e-mails and Facebook postings."Taxpayer resentment simmers." A resentment directed not toward a $25,000,000,000,000 transfer of taxpayer money to private financial crime combines, no strings attached: no firings, no takeovers, no congressional investigations, no Justice Department investigations, no new rules or regulations, no enforced give-backs, no trials, no sentences, no executions. A resentment not directed toward the $400,000,000,000 each month spent collectively (the only 21st Century American form of collectivization) on wars against the people of Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia and (covertly at the moment) Iran.
“People I don’t even know are calling me horrible names,” said Ms. Corfield, an art teacher who had pleaded the case of struggling teachers. “The mantra is that the problem is the unions, the unions, the unions.”
Across the nation, a rising irritation with public employee unions is palpable, as a wounded economy has blown gaping holes in state, city and town budgets, and revealed that some public pension funds dangle perilously close to bankruptcy. In California, New York, Michigan and New Jersey, states where public unions wield much power and the culture historically tends to be pro-labor, even longtime liberal political leaders have demanded concessions — wage freezes, benefit cuts and tougher work rules.
It is an angry conversation. Union chiefs, who sometimes persuaded members to take pension sweeteners in lieu of raises, are loath to surrender ground. Taxpayers are split between those who want cuts and those who hope that rising tax receipts might bring easier choices.
And a growing cadre of political leaders and municipal finance experts argue that much of the edifice of municipal and state finance is jury-rigged and, without new revenue, perhaps unsustainable. Too many political leaders, they argue, acted too irresponsibly, failing to either raise taxes or cut spending.
A brutal reckoning awaits, they say.
These battles play out in many corners, but few are more passionate than in New Jersey, where politics tend toward the moderately liberal and nearly 20 percent of the work force is unionized (compared with less than 14 percent nationally). From tony horse-country towns to middle-class suburbs to hard-edged cities, property tax and unemployment rates are high, and budgets are pools of red ink.
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.
No, a simmering resentment -- with a brutal reckoning awaiting! -- against people cleaning up parks, and filing away library books, and watching for forest fires, and building roads, and building bridges, and taking care of old people, and teaching children.
In 1848, de Tocqueville wrote: "society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy, and those who had anything united in common terror." It seems the division in USA 2011 will be between jackals (those with everything and, strangely, plenty of those with nothing) and humans, with the balance tipping -- thanks to corporatist foghorns such as the NYT -- toward the jackals more and more each day.
Nader:
The left has disemboweled itself. It doesn't even have a strategy every four years like a good poker player. The best example is Richard Trumka and the AFL-CIO. Obama has given them nothing. Therefore, they are demanding nothing. They huff and puff. They make tough speeches. But Trumka hasn't even made Obama's campaign pledge of a $9.50 minimum wage by this year an issue. If you want to increase consumer demand, what better way to do it than to unleash $300 billion in wages? The card check for unionization, which Obama pledged as his No. 1 sop to the labor unions, is dead. The unions do not even demand a hearing. And now wait till you see what they will do to the public employee unions. Part of it is their own fault. They are going to be crushed. Everybody is ganging up on them. You have new class warfare. It is non-unionized lower income and middle class taking it out on the unionized middle-income public employees. It is a classic example of oligarchic manipulation. It will start playing out big time in New York State with Andrew Cuomo and others. They will start saying, ‘Why are you getting this? Most workers who pay the taxes, who pay your salaries, are not getting this.' This plays.What is to be done?
