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Sunday, January 16, 2011 (SF Chronicle)
Public employees are GOP's scapegoats
Robert Reich
In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. came to support them. That city was where he lost
his life. Eventually, Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation
workers. And in subsequent years, millions of public employees across the
nation have benefited from the job protections they've earned.
But now the right is going after public employees.
Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather
deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as
corporate profits soar even as corporations refuse to hire more workers.
They don't want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before
taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they'd like to avoid a spotlight on
the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose
income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax
because of a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.
It's far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public's
work - sanitation workers, police officers, firefighters, teachers, social
workers, federal employees - to call them "faceless bureaucrats" and
portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling
budgets. The story fits better with the Republican's Big Lie that our
problems are due to a government that's too big.
Above all, Republicans don't want to have to justify continued tax cuts
for the rich. As quietly as possible, they want to make them permanent.
But the right's argument is shot through with bad data, twisted evidence
and unsupported assertions.
They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers.
That's untrue when you take into account
level of education. Matched by education, public-sector workers actually
earn less than their private-sector counterparts.
The Republican trick is to compare apples to oranges - the average wage of
public employees with the average wage of private-sector employees. But
only 23 percent of private-sector employees have college degrees; 48
percent of government workers do. Teachers, social workers, public lawyers
who bring companies to justice, government accountants who try to make
sure money is spent as it should be - all need at least four years of
college.
Compare apples to apples, and you'd see that over the past 15 years, the
pay of public-sector workers has dropped relative to private-sector
employees with the same level of education. Public-sector workers now earn
11 percent less than comparable workers in the private sector, and local
workers 12 percent less. (Even if you include health and retirement
benefits, government employees still earn less than their private-sector
counterparts with similar educations.)
Here's another whopper: Republicans say public-sector pensions are
crippling the nation. They say politicians have given in to the demands of
public unions that want only to fatten members' retirement benefits
without the public noticing. They charge that public-employee pension
obligations are out of control.
Some reforms do need to be made. Loopholes that allow public-sector
workers to "spike" their final salaries in order to get higher annuities
must be closed. And no retired public employee should be allowed to
"double dip," collecting more than one public pension.
But these are the exceptions. Most public employees don't have generous
pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45,000, the
typical newly retired public employee receives a pension of $19,000 a
year. Few would call that overly generous.
And most of that $19,000 isn't on taxpayers' shoulders. While they're
working, most public employees contribute a portion of their salaries into
their pension plans. Taxpayers are directly responsible for only about 14
percent of public retirement benefits. Many public workers aren't covered
by Social Security, so the government isn't contributing 6.25 percent of
their pay into the Social Security fund as private employers would.
Yes, there's cause for concern about unfunded pension liabilities in
future years. They're way too big. But it's much the same in the private
sector. The main reason for underfunded pensions in both public and
private sectors is investment losses that occurred during the Great
Recession. Before then, public pension funds had an average of 86 percent
of all the assets they needed to pay future benefits - better than many
private pension plans.
The solution is no less to slash public pensions than it is to slash
private ones. It's for all employers to fully fund their pension plans.
The final Republican canard is that bargaining rights for public employees
have caused state deficits to explode. In fact, there's no relationship
between states whose employees have bargaining rights and states with big
deficits. Some states that deny their employees bargaining rights -
Nevada, North Carolina and Arizona, for example - are running giant
deficits of over 30 percent of spending. Many that give employees
bargaining rights - Massachusetts, New Mexico and Montana - have small
deficits of less than 10 percent.
Public employees should have the right to bargain for better wages and
working conditions, just as all employees do. They shouldn't have the
right to strike if striking would imperil the public, but they should at
least have a voice. They often know more about whether public programs are
working, or how to make them work better, than political appointees who
hold office for only a few years.
Don't get me wrong. When times are tough, public employees should have to
make the same sacrifices as everyone else. And they are right now. Pay has
been frozen for federal workers and for many state workers across the
country as well.
But isn't it curious that when it comes to sacrifice, Republicans don't
include the richest people in America? To the contrary, they insist that
the rich should sacrifice even less, enjoying even larger tax cuts that
expand public-sector deficits. That means fewer public services, and even
more pressure on the wages and benefits of public employees.
It's only average workers - both in the public and the private sectors -
who are being called upon to sacrifice.
This is what the current Republican attack on public-sector workers is
really all about. Their version of class warfare is to pit private-sector
workers against public servants. They'd rather set average working people
against one another - comparing one group's modest incomes and benefits
with another group's modest incomes and benefits - than have Americans see
that the top 1 percent is now raking in a bigger share of national income
than at any time since 1928, and paying at a lower tax rate. And
Republicans would rather you didn't know they want to cut taxes on the
rich even more.
© Robert Reich
Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, is professor of public
policy at UC Berkeley and the author of the new book "Aftershock: The Next
Economy and America's Future." He blogs at www.robertreich.org. Contact
The Chronicle at SFGate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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