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AFSCME's Stop the Lies' aims to counter myth about public service workers

William Rogers - January 01, 2011

[Editor's note: The following story was posted on December 31, 2010 at http://leftlabor reporter.wordpress.com/ and came to Substance via Portside, one of the many news services that counters the corporate media and the whores who claim to be reporters for corporate America. In the opinion of the editors of Substance, one of the most important aspects of the AFSCME campaign is that it is taking on the statistical foolishness that tries to claim that an "average" in any complex system is meaningful. Examples abound, but some of the most pernicious are utilized by the U.S. Department of Education and were pioneered in Chicago. Because Chicago's public schools are really three distinct systems, as a result of social triage, each has to be viewed separately if any meaningful information is to be derived.

AFSCME and SEIU have been mobilizing in Chicago against cuts for several years, while, for most of those years, the teachers union sat by silently. Above, on February 2, 2007, members of AFSCME, SEIU Local 73, and hundreds of others flooded the Daley Plaza on a snowy day to protest cutbacks in essential services provided by Cook County. Despite media attacks on County Board President Todd Stroger, the workers in Cook County jobs were the first to highlight that the services they provided — from Stroger Hospital to the public defenders' offices in the county courts — were the only thing between many poor people and destitution or even death. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.The best public school system in Illinois, statistically, consists of Chicago's academic magnet high schools and gifted elementary schools. That's Tier One in the triage. Behind Tier One is an average collection of public schools, usually numbering between 150 and 250, largely serving middle class and stable working class communities in Chicago. But beyond those two system, there is a system that is unlike anything found outside the so-called Third World: Chicago's viciously segregated schools for minority and poor children. In these schools, heroic teachers battle against enormous social and political odds alongside working class parents and children to try and make something out of schools that, as the Whittier struggle showed, often don't have the most basic stuff — like libraries for the children. Now that AFSCME has begun to challenge the ruling class's phony "Law of Averages," maybe teachers and their unions will apply the same math to the nonsense that has been behind corporate "school reform" for the past 25 years (beginning with A Nation at Risk)].

AFSCME "Stop the Lies" campaign aims to counter myths about public sector workers

By William Rogers

AFSCME, the largest union of state and local government workers in the US, recently launched a media campaign, called No More Lies, to challenge the popular myth that public service workers are overpaid and have overly generous benefits.

Unions joined with immigrant rights groups to organize and lead the largest May Day demonstration in the history of the city where May Day was born on May 1, 2006. Above, UNITE HERE leads one of the contingents of people, who eventually numbered into the hundreds of thousands, marching from Union Park to Grant Park that day. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt."We aim to remind the country that attacking public services and public service workers will not fix our broken economy, create jobs or solve the growing income disparity in America," said Gerald McEntee, AFSCME's president.

The myth of the overpaid public servant has become the main talking point for media pundits and others who relish the idea of slashing public services, especially those services aimed at the working class.

They often cite this misleading factoid to make the myth seem plausible- "The average wage for public service workers," they say. "Is higher than the average wage of private sector workers."

The Carpenters Union was one of the leaders of the vast May Day march in Chicago on May 1, 2006. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.The problem with this factoid is that it is based on a faulty apple-to-oranges comparison that lumps together pay for all workers without regard for the type of work they do.

An accurate comparison would compare the wages and salaries received for similar types of work in the public and private sectors.

"In an apples-to-apples comparison state and local government employees receive less compensation than their private sector counterparts," said Dr Keith A. Bender, co-author of Out of Balance? Comparing Public and Private Pay Over 20 Years.

Out of Balance? is the published results of a study done by Bender and Dr John S. Heywood for the Center for State and Local Government Excellence.

In their study Bender and Heywood compared compensation for similar types of work and skills in the public and private sector. They found that

-- state workers make 11 percent less than their private sector cohorts; local government workers make 12 percent less and

-- even when benefits are factored in, state workers make 6.8 percent less than their private sector cohorts and local government workers make 7.4 percent less.

Representatives of the Laborers International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers union were a big part of the May Day parade in Chicago in 2006. After ignoring the March 10 immigrant rights protest that year, the national media downplayed the vast size and organization that filled Chicago on May Day, especially ignoring the dozens of unions that helped organize the backbone of the march, which at one point stretched two miles from Ashland Ave. into the Loop on its way to Grant Park. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.To put it another way, "public sector employees earn less than they would earn if they took their skills to the private sector," said Bender.

The authors also compared compensation on a state-by-state basis, and report that in 2008, the last year for which data was available, Texas state public service workers were paid 15 percent less than their counterparts in the private sector.

During the early 1980s, the pay of Texas state public service workers was comparable to pay in the private sector, but by 2001, Texas state workers were making 21 percent less than workers in the private sector.

Between 2000 and 2008, Texas state workers' pay averaged 17 percent less than private sector workers.

For the most part, public service workers don't resent the fact that their pay lags behind pay in the private sector because most chose public service for other reasons than pay.

"We work face-to-face with people and we're not making a whole lot of money," said Lashan Wiggins, a laid off child welfare worker in Illinois and AFSCME member. "We do it because we have a passion for what we do."

What most public service workers do resent, however, is being used as scapegoats by those who want to justify slashing vital public services.

AFSCME President Gerald McEntee: "Stop the Lies" Published Thursday, December 16, 2010 9:00 am by AFSCME National News

This entry by AFSCME (American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees) President Gerald McEntee is cross-posted from The Huffington Post and Firedoglake: http://www.wny labortoday.com/

Near the end of the now-classic film Chinatown, set in Los Angeles during the 1930s, working-stiff private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) confronts the greedy land developer Noah Cross:

Cross: (Portrayed by the legendary actor John Huston) About his sinister, murderous behavior...

Gittes: I just wanna know... what you're worth? More than $10 million?

Cross: Oh my, yes!

Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy

that you can't already afford?

Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future.

That scene's been on my mind as I have listened to the repugnant rhetoric that's recently spewed out of the mouths of some of our newly-elected public officials and other Right-Wing representatives of the super-rich.

During his campaign, incoming Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said: "We cannot and should not maintain a system where Public Employees are the 'haves' and the taxpayers footing the bill are the 'have-nots.'"

Now he's talking about rescinding the right of government employees to bargain collectively.

Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently told Fox News that Public Service Workers — not the Wall Street CEOs who crashed the economy (and got rich doing it) — are the 'privileged class.'

And, in a throwback to the dark days of McCarthyism, former 'Morning Zoo' shock jock Glenn Beck has the gall to say that AFSCME is synonymous with commies.

These statements are false and absurd.

By blaming Public Service Workers and Working Families, the Right Wing tries to divert attention from the simple fact that reckless, unregulated behavior of multi-millionaires on Wall Street caused unprecedented state budget shortfalls - the loss of 15 million American jobs and the collapse of our economy.

We're not going to let them get away with it.

At this pivotal moment in the economic history of our country — indeed, the world — we cannot stand by and let corporate CEOs and their flunkies define the debate and shape the future.

Working Families didn't create class warfare.

The facts speak for themselves: While median incomes in the U.S. have stagnated since the mid-1970s, incomes for those in the top 5% have more than doubled. In the past 10 years, with record-breaking tax cuts for the wealthy — incomes for the top 1% have tripled.

Economic bubble after economic bubble benefited a very small group of elite individuals, while Private Sector Workers watched their retirement security and health care benefits dissipate.

Now, after capping Private Sector Workers and their Unions in the knees, the rich and the Right have set their sights on public services and the men and women who provide them.

That's why AFSCME has created a campaign we're calling Stop the Lies.

You can join us by watching our new video and adding your name to our Stop the Lies open letter.

We aim to remind the country that attacking public services and Public Service Workers will not fix our broken economy, create jobs or solve the growing income disparity in America.

Recently, the former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote a column saying Public Employee Pensions had "metastasized into grotesque shadows of their initial good intention." He blamed workers' pensions for all kinds of things and pushed private savings plans as the future of retirement.

That just doesn't make sense.

So AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Lee Saunders set the record straight by demonstrating that pensions make sense while privatized retirement accounts put retirees at risk. He also made it clear that AFSCME would aggressively go after those who are "eager to do the bidding of the Wall Street firms that profit at the expense of workers."

The campaign calls out Right-Wing mistruths on issues such as Social Security, the deficit and tax cuts for the very wealthy.

We will use every communications tool at our disposal to dispel the myths and reveal the hypocrisy.

It won't be easy - even as we begin, Beck falsely claims AFSCME is part of a conspiracy to

silence right-wing media.

But we are good at standing up and fighting.

And what's at stake for Working Families is nothing less than the future.

WNYLaborToday.com Editor's Note: The direct link to

AFSCME's Stop The Lies Video can be accessed by

following this link:

www.afscme.org/stopthelies/?utm_source=blog&utm_campaign

=201011_StopTheLies&utm_medium=referral&__utma=1.

1139188536.1292430887.

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