Who's Fighting for Public Workers?

[marmar]

Who's Fighting for Public Workers?

Wednesday, 07 May 2014 12:23
By Richard Eskow, Campaign for America's Future | News Analysis


Sometimes you have to step back a few paces to see how much conservatism has distorted the public debate. Case in point: employment. Somehow the right has managed to stigmatize public-sector jobs so effectively that only politicians of rare and admirable courage are willing to defend them.

Unfortunately, those politicians seems to be in short supply nowadays.

Bill McBride wrote an excellent overview of public and private sector job growth under the last six presidents in his Calculated Risk blog. This chart was especially striking:



......(snip)......

The outlier is Barack Obama. 710,000 public-sector jobs – that’s nearly three-quarters of a million – have been lost since Obama took office.

President Obama is not the architect of these losses. Most of them have taken place at the state and local level, although federal jobs are now gaining a larger share of the losses. At every level, job loss has been fueled by Republican-backed cuts and stymied by conservative hostility toward government jobs. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/23553-whos-fighting-for-public-workers

[pipoman]

1. Public sector jobs are usually the last

To feel recession. Private sector jobs have experienced a fairly dramatic reduction of wage and benefits over the last couple of decades. This reduction has lowered tax revenue and caused severe budget issues in almost every state. The private sector has demanded parity. When the taxpayers feel that the public employees wage and benefits are out of sync with their compensation packages a push occurs.