Take the Day Off 0
Without pay.
I do not envy the governors, mayors, county supervisors, and their colleagues faced with balancing budgets because the bottom has fallen out of the economy, therefore cutting their revenues off at the knees.
Furloughs are among many options, including reductions in employee benefits, large cuts or possible tax increases listed as measures that could be used to put the state in the black. But Gov. Jack Markell has noted that, when laying off 1,000 state employees would save just $50 million, simple furloughs would make a minimal dent in the money gap.
A typical work year contains 260 or 261 work days.
Twenty-six unpaid days = 10% pay cut.
Government workers are like workers everywhere else. They go to work, try to do a good job, and just barely squeak by. Some of them may be slugs and loads, but that is just as true of employees at IBM, Purdue, CIGNA, or the small law firm down the street.
Persons do not get up in the morning and say to themselves, “I’m going to go to work and do a bad job today.”
So why all the jokes about government workers? I think they are an easy target, like mothers-in-law. Yet, despite all the mother-in-law jokes, most persons I know actually like their mothers-in-law. In some cases, they like their mothers-in-law more than they like their spouses. But the jokes are still out there.
The government employees we are likely to deal with directly–the ones who answer the phones or who staff the windows at, for example, the Division of Motor Vehicles–are occasionally grumpy. Since a significant percentage of the persons who call them on the phone or come to their windows are idiots, I’m not surprised they are sometimes grumpy. At the local DMV, I have seen the clerks keep their patience and composure, if not always their good humor, with persons who would have sent me screaming off into the night.
And they really aren’t paid all that much. Here’s the Delaware figures for FY 2009. Remember that the great majority of them are in the bottom half of the pay ranks. In other words, their annual salary after taxes and withholding is less than the price of a new Cadillac:
(And no $20,000,000,000.00 set aside for bonuses either, even though, unlike Wall Street CEOs, most of state employees I have dealt with actually knew what they were doing.)
And, like the rest of us, most government employees are living from paycheck to paycheck, trying to figure out how to pay their rents or mortgages, their kids’ school expenses or college tuition, their car payments, their uncovered medical expenses.
I don’t envy the state and county executives. And it’s not just them.
Persons all over the place are caught in wreckage of the Republican Party’s failed stewardship of governance.
No answers here. Just frustration that the greed and incompetence of the very powerful and very rich end up destroying the lives of honest working persons.
