The Public Sector

In Wisconsin and many other states where Republicans are the governing majority, the primary goal these days is to chip away at budget deficits by making life as miserable as possible for the public labor force. The GOP recognizes an opportunity when it sees one, and isn't about to let a chance to demolish labor unions pass when they can claim it's necessary to protect public interests. My interest in most American political controversies is purely academic, but this time I have a dog in the fight.

My first job was mowing lawns for ladies in my neighborhood when I was in junior high. During my senior year in college, I was a courier for Western Union and delivered telegrams about twenty hours per week. Those two jobs were the full extent of my employment in the private sector.

I worked in cotton fields in the summers following my junior and senior years in high school, earning roughly 76 cents an hour. The labor was necessary for breeding experiments, and I was paid with a government check. Every other paycheck I received thereafter was issued by the federal government, the state government, or a local independent school district. After college, I was a public school teacher, an army officer, a GA in graduate school, then a caseworker in the state public welfare department and a unit supervisor in the same agency. All some form of government work, all paid from some public treasury or another.

I was never a member of a labor union, never a party to a collective bargaining agreement, and always earned considerably less than my friends working in the private sector for companies like Brown and Root or Halliburton. Except for the ones from the U.S. Army, every check I received had a deduction for both FICA and state retirement.  In jobs offering health coverage, insurance premiums were also deducted. Federal income taxes were withheld, and nearly every dime I earned was circulated back into the economy. All the jobs were demanding and required variable amounts of uncompensated overtime, and I was always pissed off when some piss-ignorant fucking yahoo wrote a letter to a newspaper bitching about public employees slopping at the taxpayer trough and freeloading in general.

My father and my wife spent most of their careers in state employment also, and it wouldn't be a stretch to say that in many ways my life has depended on government jobs... so excuse me if my empathy with public employees in Texas and other places is offensive.