There have been a lot of negative things written about public workers lately, not just in our local newspapers, but everywhere we turn: Our healthcare benefits are too generous. Our pension costs are too onerous. Governments should make do with less, as should the people who staff them.
Our healthcare benefits have been won over a period of years. Our unions have done like other unions. We have traded higher wage increases for better benefits. That is the case not only with our healthcare benefits, but our pension plans, our sick days, our personal days and other things dickered over at the bargaining table. We have behaved no differently than autoworkers, steelworkers or airline workers.
What unions have done was not wrong. It is not wrong. It was and is to win better benefits for the members of those unions. Tens of millions of working people in this country have better lives as a result of the wages and benefits won for them by their unions. Tens of millions more have similarly better wages and benefits because their bosses want to keep unions away from the door. When unions win better lives for their members, they are winning better lives for all workers. That is the way it works. "A rising tide lifts all boats," as the saying goes.
Ah, but the US economy has been in a tailspin. Everybody has got to tighten their belts. We have to make do with fewer resources for more people. So the conventional arguments go. But where were those conventional arguments when Wall Street was being bailed out? When financiers were basically granting themselves millions of dollars in bonuses and stock options? Somehow it is supposed to be belt-tightening for you and me, John and Jane Q. Public, but the sky's the limit for corporate and finance executives.
We believe in fairness in this country. That is one of the things that makes us Americans. That is one of the ways we can recognize each other. The above scenario just is not fair. If Wall Street executives can have their bailouts, their bonuses and their stock options, why cannot we on Main Street, at City Hall Plaza and at Ashburton Place have our healthcare benefits and our pension plans?
If it is because we live in a finite world with limited resources, then I think it is time we took another look at how those resources are divided. There is something unconscionably wrong with financiers buying mega mansions while ordinary folk like you and me are losing our homes to foreclosure, whether we were renting or owning those homes. For us to be losing our jobs and our healthcare while Wall Street execs sail off to Jamaica or jet off to Asia.
The solution to healthcare and pension costs is not to drag public workers down. It is to pull private industry workers up. If we can afford to shower those who already have a lot of money with even more of it, we can also rethink our priorities. We can decide in our cities, our states and our nation NOT to shower them with so much. We can instead divide up our pie more evenly. We can as a nation decide to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan completely. Help the different parties to the conflicts there negotiate their way toward coalition governments. We can decide that maybe we do not really need, as a people, to have 780 or so military bases around the world. We can stop spending so much on military solutions and Wall Street bailouts. Then we will have money available for single-payer health insurance, either nationally or state-by-state. If we do those things we will have freed up a lot of our country's resources.
If we apportion the pie more evenly, public workers can have their pensions and their healthcare benefits, now more rationally configured, and so can the autoworkers, the steel workers, the airline workers, the Wal-Mart employees and the Mom-and-Pop staffs, all over our country. A rising tide lifts all boats. However, huge, luxury ocean-liners hit icebergs created by their own folly.
I am a long-time employee of the City of Boston.
