I scared my mother today.
Whilst visiting with my mom in the kitchen this morning, scraps of Fox Noise drifted out from the family room where my father was alternately listening and napping. Although I mostly tried to ignore it, one comment... so blatantly false, so patently ridiculous, and so personally offensive to me, leaked into my consciousness.
And of course, on this "fair and balanced" news site, this statement went unchallenged. Since I was not watching - and honestly, I was only listening with the half of an ear I could not plug up lest I dropped my share of the conversational ball with my mother - I did not get the exact quote, nor who said it, but it went something like this: Public employees are paid much higher salaries than private employees. And it was related in a perfectly matter-of-fact, conversational tone. It was just taken for granted, like the sun will rise tomorrow.
I very nearly spontaneously combusted. Dive below the orange curlicue for my rant.
But first, let's keep in mind that my parents are elderly - my dad is 82, and on oxygen all the time, although he is able to live at home. And my mom, who will be 80 this year, spent half of the morning updating me on her A-fib status, also while wearing an oxygen nasal thingy. So I have to be careful, because they are both frail and I don't want to be responsible for upsetting either of them to the point where they have to be hospitalized. Irregardless of their health, I could not remain quiet and allow such a bald falsehood to go unchallenged any more than I can fly to the moon.
And for some reason, it was really important to me that my mom, who is pretty much a lifelong republican, as is my father, understand this dual issue: number one, that such a statement went entirely unchallenged, and number two, that every bit of my life experience tells me that the polar opposite of this statement is true.
You see, I have been (and am, and will continue to be until I retire) a public employee. Virtually all of my 30 year career has been in public service, and yes - it is service. Of course I get paid - but I daresay that a very competent professional with 30 years experience and a terminal degree in a specialized field, supervising 14 employees doing specialized and life-or-death work for a private corporation, would be paid far more than I ever have been.
Some proof of this can be found in my very own family. I have a brother who did not finish college, got a job at a bank, and earned at least double what I did. His wife, a high school graduate, worked for a major equipment-building firm as a project manager and earned a salary that made my paycheck look like compensation for a part-time summer job. I have a younger sister who attended a two year business college in medical records, worked her way up to be a private assistant to one of the vice presidents of a huge multinational pharmaceutical firm, and earned far more than I did. It was actually a family joke at one time, that I was the daughter my parents gave up to public service, kind of like large Catholic families in years past gave up a son to the priesthood or a daughter to the convent.
Even aside from the evidence readily found in my family of origin, events occur on a daily basis that drive this point home. Our state budget is increasingly balanced on the backs of public employees. The state legislature refuses to raise taxes, and our local governmental body has followed suit. In fact, with a local school system deficit of 1.5 million dollars, the town council actually reduced local taxes. Believe it or not, residents of this area publicly plead with the council to raise their taxes to properly fund education! (How often can you say that has happened? In this locality, citizens have been begging for appropriate funding of the schools for the past couple of years.)
The current deficit forced our local school system to delay replacing old and decrepit school buses, which will be fine until a school bus going down the highway at 55 mph has some mechanical issue that causes a wreck. It also required the school system to lay off a number of administrators. They would have laid off teachers, except for the fact that they have been laying off teachers for the past four years, and I guess they feared that if they laid off any more the City Council members would have to go in the classrooms and teach lessons themselves. Horrors! And it is important to add that when teachers' contracts are not renewed, when staff are let go, when administrators are laid off... their work does not disappear; the student numbers are not reduced. The mandates given to schools by the feds and states are not null and void... this work is taken on by the ones who are left.
In an adjacent city, a friend who works for a branch of local government tells me that their agency recently did a salary/benefits comparison of their public administrative support employees with comparable positions in private business. They discovered that the public employees were way underpaid, resulting in a much needed and deserved upward adjustment to their salaries to bring them into line with equivalent private jobs. This type of survey had not been done in many years, so these employees had been paid far less than their worth for years before this correction - which, by the way, was not retroactive.
And it is not just local governments who are busily screwing state employees. The state legislature, in order to balance their budgets this year and keep the state retirement fund afloat without having to contribute any more money into it, now requires state workers to contribute 5% of their salary into the retirement fund. That seems fair, you say? Well, yes, it does - UNTIL you take into account the history of this.
In the mid 1980s, during another republican-created squeeze on public employees, the state had no money to fund raises, despite the rapidly rising cost of living. In an effort to retain trained employees, in two of those years they added additional holidays - making the Friday after Thanksgiving a holiday one year, and creating the Martin Luther King Day holiday another year. And another year, in lieu of a raise, the state agreed to pay the employee's share of the 5% contribution to the retirement fund. Employees objected, of course - we knew that this sort of thing could be taken away at the whim of the legislature, and what would bind the future legislatures to maintain this? We were assured not to worry, this relief from the employee contribution would be permanent, just like a raise. Well, guess what? This year we lost it. Boom. Oh, there is language about phasing it in, and requirements that local governments hold employees harmless by giving a raises equivalent to what will be lost or paying it out of local funds... but that does not benefit anyone who changes jobs (even due to a promotion), or new employees. Those salary scales are not going up to accommodate the 5% that will be taken away - new and promoted employees will see the 5% deducted from their payroll checks, with no compensating increase of 5%.
And one last thing - a small and personal indignity. I am often required to drive in my job - I visit clients in their homes, and occasionally transport clients to various meetings. Most of the time, I prefer to drive my personal car, which is safe, has airbags, and all of the features work. But when I transport clients, I do not want my personal insurance to be responsible for any freak thing that might occur, so I take the agency car that is assigned to me. I was thrilled when I learned that the car I have used for years - a 1986 Chevy 4x4, which only gets one radio station, has no working clock (not a big deal), no working cigarette lighter (a big deal because of the need to plug in my GPS), and windshield wipers that randomly turn off and on - was being replaced - until I drove it's replacement: a 1981 chevy lumina whose radio does not work and which still has no working power source for my GPS. Sigh. Tell me ANY private sector employee driving anything remotely similar, and I will apologize for my whining.
So I unloaded all of this on my poor little mama, who could do nothing but sit and look at me wide-eyed. I think I might have scared her. And yet I could not help myself - from there, I launched into a passionate diatribe about how republicans were trying to solve this financial crisis about as effectively as trying to heal an anorexic by putting him on a starvation diet.
At this point, I could see that she was on information overload, and the robot from "Lost in Space" came to mind... "This does not compute".
"Just promise me you will vote Democratic in this election", I finished. "It is the most important election in my lifetime".
"I'll think about it", she says.
And if she really thinks about it, there is no option.