Demonizing the public sector harms the middle class

http://drummajorinstitute.org/library/article.php?ID=7554

August 26, 2010 | The Hill

by Amy Traub

Amy Traub is director of research at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a nonpartisan think tank focused on advancing progressive policy in cities and for cities.

The nation’s middle class is under attack. The recession hit private businesses and public budgets hard, but Americans’ ability to attain or hold onto a middle-class standard of living may be the ultimate victim. We’re losing jobs, losing services we depend on, losing pay and benefits. Yet instead of working to build up the middle class, a growing chorus of pundits insists that dragging down city and state workers across the country is the answer to our economic woes. Democratic mayors and governors fall for this ploy at their peril: it threatens the nation’s economic recovery, and feeds into conservatives’ anti-government, anti-worker agenda.

Democrats are at their best when they promote the creation of good jobs that enable working people to support a family. They have their work cut out for them: with persistently high unemployment, companies boast that they can now hire highly productive workers at a lower wage with fewer benefits. It’s no wonder that corporate profits are up 44 percent while working people have yet to benefit from the expansion. Economic growth on these terms erodes the middle class and threatens to split the nation between the wealthy and everyone else. With midterm and gubernatorial elections on the horizon, voters recognize that this is the wrong direction for the country.

Despite the evident pain and political discontent caused by the disappearance of good jobs, we hear growing calls to put the same destructive dynamic that’s destroying the private sector middle class into motion in the public sector. Although the best research indicates that city and state employees nationwide earn less in pay and benefits than similarly-situated private sector workers, critics complain that the quality of public sector jobs may not be deteriorating as quickly as it is in the private sector. They point out that states and cities could operate more cheaply if they turned public jobs into the same type of contingent, no-benefits, low-paid work that’s eating away at the private sector middle class. Privatization and outsourcing are means to the same end.

But trashing our middle class in an effort to cut costs is short sighted. Downgrading the middle-class pay and benefits of public workers only speeds their erosion in the private sector, undermining everyone who works for a living. Democrats who sign on to this agenda are betraying their own values: rather than parroting conservative talking points, they should be working to rebuild job standards in the private sector, throwing their weight behind grassroots efforts to expand living wage laws and guarantee paid sick days to workers in cities and states nationwide. Rather than attacking public pensions that afford retirees a middle-class standard of living, they should be thinking about how to increase retirement security for millions of private sector employees with meager savings.

FULL story at link.

Good post. :thumbsup:

papers.

It is an attempt to get the working class to fight against each other. My guess is that we will start fighting for the ever shrinking piece of the pie and none of us will gain anything good by it.

the state workers :( GAS did that months ago. it's a blatant attempt to destroy the unions.

I know plenty of folks -- Main Street, workingclass folks -- who are already falling for it.

But here's the thing: If local and state workers are being overpaid, if pension promises have been made that can't be kept... that's not a labor problem.

That's a MANAGEMENT problem.

Who are the incompetent, short-sighted executives who created this situation? Hmmm...

It relates to the phony "debate" over Social Security: WE, the people who paid into it, we don't have a "crisis."

YOU, the lawmakers and policymakers who misused, squandered or outright STOLE the dough... YOU guys have a problem.

A big problem. Believe me.