Labor & Employment Law

Time to Backlash at Public Employee Bash

By Mike Hall

Public employees, the folks who teach our kids, fix our streets, put out our fires and protect our families, have been getting raked over the PR coals lately. Right-wing lawmakers, anti-government hysterics and some mainstream media have blasted?quite wrongly?their work ethic, skills, pay and pensions.

A recent balderdash-filled screed by U.S. News and World Report publisher Mort Zuckerman laid the blame for the nation?s financial collapse at the feet of public employees and their unions.

But as AFSCME President Gerald McEntee noted at Huffington Post, Zuckerman, ?one of the world?s wealthiest men,? never mentions

the reprehensible behavior of the investment and banking community in causing an economic collapse that wiped out half a generation of retirement savings (including the home equity that many had counted on), nor acknowledges that wealthy Americans pay less in taxes than they did 60 years ago.

Click here to read McEntee?s entire column.

We think it?s time to show a little love and respect for public employees and the work they do.

The Northwest Labor Press and, oddly enough, Michael Medved, the conservative radio host and longtime critic of almost everything to the left of Mitch McConnell, provide some good perspective on public employees.

In its most recent edition, the Northwest Labor Press reports that AFSCME state employees who must take non-paid furlough days because of the state?s budget crisis aren?t sitting home watching TV or going fishing. They?re pitching in with community service projects that will benefit the public.

Thus far, members of Oregon AFSCME have used furlough days to plant native plants in Tualatin, assemble science kits for a Portland after-school group, remove invasive plants along Rinearson Creek in Gladstone, and prepare food at a Eugene soup kitchen.

One day last month, about a dozen AFSCME members held a clean-up session for a section of the Willamette River running through Portland. Kevin Williams, a water quality analyst and shop steward at AFSCME Local 3336, told the paper:

A group of us wanted to be able to continue to provide public service on the days we?re not getting paid to provide public service.

Click here for the full article.

In a USA Today op-ed yesterday, Medved writes that his progressive teacher union activist mother, Renate Hirsch Medved, taught him several things, ?that even in the midst of today’s passionately polarized debates, all current conservatives (including me, her oldest son) could benefit from,? including:

Don?t demonize public employees.

Today, governments at all levels face insolvency….Confronting this crisis shouldn’t mean stigmatizing the teachers, law enforcement personnel, and even social workers and bureaucrats who, in most cases, serve the public with diligence and dedication.

Any attempt to label public workers as selfish or lazy will falter because too many Americans know friends or family members who, like my mother, offer powerful counter-examples.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on July 09, 2010 (boomark / email).