I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Many of the people living there were members of public service unions. They were cops, firemen, sanitation workers, social services employees, teachers.
It wasn’t a ritzy neighborhood but it was comfortable. The houses were small, many attached, but exceptionally well tended, It was a very safe area. People there all owned cars, and while few had attended college themselves, most were sending their own kids off to college because they could afford to do so on the salaries they earned.
I don’t want to romanticize the way these public service unions operated when I was growing up in New York. There was corruption; there were deals with the city’s authorities that should never have been made; there were work rules that occasionally transcended good sense and sometimes sense generally. But overall these unions served their twin goals extraordinarily well: they kept the city relatively safe, clean, travel worthy and educated; and they gave their members a middle class lifestyle that their own parents had rarely been able to achieve, along with the dream of even better lifestyles for their children.
Which brings us to the fiscal challenges local governments around the U.S. face today, and the way a growing number of them are choosing to meet these challenges — an approach summed up neatly in a January 3, 2011 New York Times article headed: “Strained States Turning to Laws to Curb Labor Unions.”
That article reads in part:: “State officials from both parties are wrestling with ways to curb the salaries and pensions of government employees, which typically make up a significant percentage of state budgets…Mostly in states with Republican governors and Republican statehouse majorities — officials are seeking more far-reaching, structural changes that would weaken the bargaining power and political influence of unions…even threatening to take away government workers’ right to form unions and bargain contracts.”
Here’s reality in this realm as I see it. Breaking the right of public employees to unionize is disgusting. Reducing some perks and changing pension rules of public service employees, however, has become absolutely necessary because of the fiscal situations of many local governments, and their legal requirement to have balanced budgets. But…
And this is a very big But. The perks and pensions of government workers are not the primary cause of local governments’ fiscal distress. Its primary cause is the awful recession that has so undermined government finances. And to address this challenge, all sectors of our society, ALL SECTORS, should be required to sacrifice, not just public employees.
You look at a state like New Jersey where a Republican governor is not only aggressively going after the benefits of government employees, but seeking to cut their ranks dramatically, at the same time he vetoes a millionaires tax on that state’s most well-heeled residents.
It’s a most interesting situation there in New Jersey. Many of its richest residents work just across the river on Wall Street in Manhattan. Wall Streeter’s greed and stupidity played a huge role in bringing about our present recession woes. But Wall Streeter residents of New Jersey, who can well afford it, don’t take a tax hit, while the state’s teachers and other public service workers feel the full brunt of the state’s budgetary ax.
It’s doubtful that a single investment banker living in New Jersey makes less than the highest paid public service employee in that state. Yet these Wall Streeter’s are somehow excluded from sharing the financial sacrifices that state now demands. Taxing the very rich, it appears, has become the new third rail of state as well as federal policy-making
Why are the middle class lifestyles of so many being ground down while the exorbitant lifestyles of the richest few are largely excluded from making a sacrifice? Because our political norms have devolved to such an extent that some ideological crank merely has to mutter “socialist,” or “liberal” or “class warfare” and common decency and notions of shared community are swept aside.
How very sad. Not just from the perspective of social cohesion, but from the economic perspective as well. We once knew better in this country, and we were a better people for it.
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