Government workers: The latest Republican scapegoats
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
The aftershocks of the financial earthquake that hit the United States in 2008 will be felt at home and abroad for many years to come. They will come in the form of high unemployment, skyrocketing home foreclosures, and savage cuts in programs that help not only the poor, the sick, and the elderly but also a wide swath of the middle class. Not even previously untouchable programs like Social Security are safe from the budget cutter’s knife.
From Iceland to Ireland, from Greece to Spain, from Britain to the United States, the new mantra is austerity. All are called to sacrifice the modest gains working people have made through decades of arduous struggle in order to achieve a modicum of security in an uncertain world — decent pensions, living wages, unemployment compensation, medical insurance.
According to the leaders of almost all the developed countries, everyone must swallow the bitter pill of reduced living standards and increased insecurity. All except the very individuals and organizations — the hedge fund managers who played roulette with other people’s money, the big Wall Street banks and other financial titans like the insurance company AIG — who were most directly responsible for the financial collapse and the ensuing economic devastation of tens of millions of people’s lives. Instead of standing trial for their misdeeds, the culprits who caused the ongoing financial and economic catastrophe have been rewarded with hundreds of billions of U.S. government funds — money that came out of the pockets of the countless teachers, firefighters, government employees, and other workers who are now being asked to tighten their belts several notches. In contrast to the belt-tightening being demanded from the rest of the population, the government has propped up Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other financial giants to prevent them from losing a dime.
Indeed, by 2009, while the rest of the country was just beginning to feel the full brunt of the Great Recession, the big Wall Street financial institutions were back to their old tricks, awarding their top employees record compensation and gigantic bonuses. In 2010, with the official unemployment rate near 10 percent and real unemployment closer to 20 percent, these same financial institutions outdid themselves. They paid their executives even bigger bonuses than the record levels established just the year before. If that were not enough, Republicans in Congress used the threat of blocking an extension of unemployment benefits to blackmail the Obama administration into extending Bush’s tax cuts for the rich for two years and agreeing to a low tax rate on estates. Clearly, austerity is not an equal opportunity condition.
Now the Republican/conservative class warriors are coming after one of the last bastions of economic fairness and employment security: government employees and their unions. During the last three decades, beginning in the early 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s destruction of the air traffic controllers’ union and continuing during the presidencies of both Bush Sr. and Jr., there has been a concerted campaign by employers and their friends in government to cripple unions. Coupled with de-industrialization and the export of jobs to low wage economies such as China and India as part of corporate-led globalization, anti-union government policies have shrunken the union movement to where it is now a shadow of its former self.
As a result, the bargaining power of both union and non-union workers has been drastically reduced. Whereas in the years between the end of World War II and the 1970s, workers’ wages rose with gains in productivity and accounted for a healthy slice of the economic surplus, in the last thirty years nearly all productivity gains have gone to employers. The result has been soaring profits for corporations and stagnant wages for workers.
In this bleak picture, the only bright spot for workers and unions has been in some service sector industries and, more importantly, among public sector workers, including teachers, nurses, and state and local government workers. But now there are menacing clouds looming in the horizon of this silver lining.
Politicians, the media, Tea Party supporters, and conservative/Republicans have set their sights on government workers, claiming that they are overpaid and inefficient. Government workers are being made the scapegoats for local and state budget woes that are the result of sharply decreased revenues because of collapsing home values and high unemployment. Teachers’ unions have come in for more of their share of demonization.
Some of the most influential media voices have bought into the narrative that the American people are ready to bring out their pitchforks to go after government workers. As an example, on New Year’s Day, public-sector workers were greeted by a front page story in the Washington Post headlined “Public Workers Face Outrage as Budget Crises Grow.” The article asserts that there is a hostile national mood against public-sector 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.”
The reality is that much of the hostility is being whipped up by Republican politicians and pundits who for decades have railed against “overpaid government bureaucrats.” Yet several studies, including some by conservative think tanks, have shown that public- sector employees are on average paid somewhat less than their private sector counterparts with equal education and qualifications. Yet, even President Obama felt compelled to join the attack on government workers by freezing the pay of federal employees. Ironically, public employment has been one of the best, and sometimes only, path for minorities to make it into the middle class.
The efforts to lay the blame for the sorry condition of the country on everyone but those responsible raises the question of whether corporate influence on U.S. political institutions has become so entrenched and powerful that it cannot be effectively challenged or chastised even when corporate irresponsibility threatens to wreak havoc on the nation.
