re: #88 Sionainn

In my state, when everyone else was rolling in the dough, teachers didn’t get big raises like everyone else. There were too many of them, so they got screwed. Now, people are screaming that teachers need to sacrifice just like everyone else, thereby getting screwed again.

The full brunt of any tax increase needed to balance a budget will be borne by public employees (including teachers) in the form of low or zero pay adjustments, furloughs (reduced work weeks) etc.

The politicians don’t want to raise taxes. Neither do they want to make the very hard decisions as to which services the governmental jurisdiction needs to STOP PROVIDING in order to balance the budget. Either option would work, but nope. The public employees bear the brunt of it.

Mind you - the LEGISLATIVE BODY will mandate which services a government jurisdiction needs to provide or not provide. Then agencies hire employees needed to do that work. Then the legislature comes back and says - oops, sorry, we don’t have enough money to pay you. When I was working the mantra was, “We have to do MORE with LESS!”.

Yeah, right, like that’s even possible. I can’t tell you how sick I got of hearing that.

And government workers work as hard as anyone else. The challenge in government work, that doesn’t exist in private sector work so much, is that public employees are trying to ensure they carry out the intent of the legislative laws created for whatever service they’re providing, and they must provide accountability. Which means TONS of paperwork.

One more point - when public sector employment is not funded, and agencies have to try to do MORE with LESS, that means that there’s one less person helping with the lines at your DMV. And that ONE missing person will be sufficient to create a long-line back-up, whereas there would be short or no lines if that one person was there.