While many of us in the law enforcement community and in the labor movement rarely like what we read in the news media, now and then we catch a story that wakes us up and makes us think a little harder — and just maybe a little clearer. A June 9, 2005, article by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson entitled “Public Workers Under Fire, Schwarzenegger Targets A Last Bastion of Security” gave us something to think about.
“America has a problem with its public employees. They are not downwardly mobile enough,” Meyerson says. As evidence of the growing divide between the public and private sectors, Meyerson adds, “.... Fully 90 percent of [public sector workers] have defined-benefit pensions as of old. In the private sector, just 60 percent of employees have retirement plans, and a scant 24 percent still cling to defined-benefit plans. Fully 86 percent of public employees are covered by on-the-job health insurance; in the private sector, the rate has fallen to 66 percent.”
“But are decent living standards in one sector sustainable when they’re dependent on the taxes of an increasingly beleaguered private sector?” he asks. “More and more, conservative political strategists see an opportunity to weaken the Democrats ... by pitting private-sector voters against public-sector ones. That certainly was Gov. Schwarzenegger’s goal earlier this year when he backed an initiative that would have terminated the defined-benefit pensions for California’s state and municipal employees and shifted them to 401(k)’s instead.”
“Schwarzenegger’s plan had a few glitches — most notably, ending survivor benefits for widows and orphans of police officers and firefighters killed on the job. Facing an onslaught of criticism, Schwarzenegger backed off the initiative. But the war between Arnold and California’s public employees has spread across many fronts. ...”
In the fall 2005 election in California, Schwarzenegger’s business backers funded another initiative that would have curtailed the ability of public-sector unions to fund political campaigns. That referendum went down to defeat following an intense and united labor movement’s opposition.
But as Meyerson notes, “Though the attacks from the gazillionaire governor on the state’s public servants have only backfired, Arnold’s handlers do not sound daunted.”
Meyerson adds that a veteran Republican political strategist advised the governor’s handlers on how they’d go after the public employees: “These people are on your payroll, and they are out to roll you every day, that creates a kind of phenomenon of anger. ...” Wow, so that’s the “winning” strategy: to convince the public that police, firefighters and teachers are out to roll them!
“The problems faced by public-sector workers as the private sector grows steadily meaner aren’t going away, ...”
“. ... If we can’t create more security in the private sector ... the modest security of a work life in the public sector will surely be eroded, too,” Meyerson concludes.
Now here’s the heart of the matter. Pitting police against other public
employees, or public against private employees, are no-win situations. If
police and other unions don’t work together, as they did in Boston
in 2004 and in California in 2005, it will be difficult indeed to stop pension
and benefit cuts from passing through local and state legislative bodies
to meet budget shortfalls. The pensions of police officers who risk their
lives every day for the public could be on the chopping block without the
support of other organized employees. Labor solidarity is the only way to
go!
