ziggy29
Moderator Emeritus
Agreed that unions are a side issue here. It's easy to use some people's negative views of unions to gain support for letting these "promises" become worthless.These are actually two different issues. One is the past promise made toward pensions. Should it be respected? It wasn't for people in the private sector, so why should public sector employees be treated any differently? The other is the average wage. It has been sharply reduced in the private sector. Why should the public sector employee earn so much more? Throwing in unions is a diversion that shifts the discussion away from the real questions and offers a bogeyman that serves to rally support for actions that otherwise might be unacceptable. In my view the real issues are:
- Should public sector employees be paid the pensions they were promised?
- Should public sector employees be paid a living wage?
I think the important thing here isn't that people want to see the "race to the bottom" accelerated by pulling the rug out from the public sector employees. To me, it's more a matter of drawing attention to the BS that we private sector stiffs have endured for *many* years and ask, why was it okay for us to get the middle finger from our employers for many years, and as soon as someone with a government employer has to sample a very small taste of what we've endured since the 1990s, it's an outrage that promises are being broken?
I don't want to see other people get screwed just because I did -- I hope I've made that abundantly clear in the past. But I do sometimes feel like a second class citizen when we endure years of frozen pay, eliminated retirement benefits, watered down health insurance and layoffs galore -- and almost no one seemed to be motivated into action. But let a tiny fraction of that "employee abuse" occur in the public sector, and the workers must be protected. I'm all for protecting them, but what about the rest of us? I can't watch my real wages decline by more than 10% over the last 6 years and watch the amount of taxes needed to fund public sector compensation continue to rise.