Firedoglake on America’s Public Employees

Jordan Barab at Firedoglake has a compelling post entitled “America’s Public Employees: Live Like Slaves, Die Like Dogs” in which Mitch Daniels gets special mention for dissolving public employee collective bargaining rights as one of his first acts as Governor.

Barab describes what these folks do for us:

But why should public employees have the same rights that private sector employees have? Aren’t they pretty much just bureaucrats who work in nice clean offices with cushy benefits?

Hardly.

I ran the health and safety program for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) for 16 years, which means I became quite knowledgeable about what public employees actually do every day. And most of it ain’t pretty (nor is it well paying, especially where there’s no union): wading knee-deep through asphyxiating raw sewage in rat-infested sewers and wastewater treatment plants; taking care of our mentally ill in understaffed, under equipped, overcrowded violent institutions, teaching and driving buses in underfunded, crumbling inner-city schools; guarding the imprisoned refuse of society that most people didn’t even want to think about in understaffed, overcrowded prisons; laboring on the roads in the dead of night, mere inches away from speeding, hostile drivers; dealing with angry social service clients in understaffed, under funded agencies; dealing with the parents of abused children or inspecting housing in neighborhoods that armed police are reluctant to enter; taking care of this society’s poorest, sickest populations in understaffed, overcrowded public hospitals, — in other words, doing the invisible jobs that this society demands to maintain the comfortable style of living that most of us take for granted.

Barab then goes on to tell us why we should care, describing the “liberal” reaction to the New York City transit strike where many supported the strikers “in principle” but were nonetheless put out by having to be inconvenienced during the Christmas season. In addition, there was the resentment that organized public employees often have better pay and benefits than many public sector employees who are “better educated.”

People fell into the trap of assuming that because most workers these days get less than the transit workers in terms of pay and benefits (thanks Wal-Mart), that the transit workers should face reality, settle for less and just be happy they still have jobs. But they forget the important lesson of this globalized world: in a race to the bottom, there’s no finish line.