Here I am at last week's Solidarity rally in downtown Asheville
A Facebook friend posted a link to an article that said the public sector is shedding jobs at an alarming rate. My friend, like many other Americans, thought that was a good thing.
Get rid of public jobs and your taxes go down, right? The private sector can pick up the services and then we don’t have to pay those high wages and benefits, plus it’s more efficient.
Only if you think Halliburton and the other no-bid contractors have saved us money in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Public sector jobs are jobs. If you fire public workers, you have that many more unemployed.
The only reason the right is attacking public workers is because they haven’t been able to bust those unions yet.
Fewer than 10 percent of private-sector employees are members of a union, and those who are enjoy a lot fewer benefits than they once did. Meanwhile, their employers are raking in the money hand over fist.
When you privatize public services, the union workers lose their jobs and are replaced with people making a whole lot less money and often receiving few, if any, benefits. Meanwhile costs for the same services go up. There’s less oversight, which is just what the right wants.
The average public worker only has better benefits than the average private-sector employee because of the protection of the unions. Their salaries average about the same as private-sector workers — they used to average a lot less, but the private sector has lost a lot of ground since Reagan took office and this mad dash to privitization began.
Government is not bad. It is the most efficient provider of services such as police, fire and military protection, social services, roads and other infrastructure, education and more. Get rid of or privatize those services and you’ll get lower quality for a lot more money.
This sin’t about affordability; there’s plenty to go around — it’s just that most of it is being hoarded by the top 2 percent.
We weren’t paying attention as the private-sector unions were dismantled; we need to now.
