I been hearing the Republicans and the right wing screaming that “government” workers in Wisconsin are paid more than private sector workers.
That is NOT true. The public workers in Wisconsin make LESS than private sector workers.
This is one of those things that people can toss out numbers and in fact lie about and get away with it.
Yes, if you take “government” workers and compare them to “private” sector employees and do not do it in a fair way you can come up with a lie to support your anti-government and anti-union talk.
You got to remember when you talk about “private” sector employees many of those are fast food workers and an Walmart employees.
You got to compare job vs job. The state does not employee many fast food workers or greeters at Walmart. They do employ a lot of people with degrees and people that do a lot of skilled work.
I have seen a number of amounts. One is that public workers in Wisconsin make 4.8% less private workers.
Now there is a history all across government (state and federal level) to make sure that government workers have a nice pension. I am sure there are many good reasons for this happening. I suspect one major one is that you want to keep government workers because you want skilled and trained and caring workers serving all of us.
When I went to work as a hospital security officer in 1972 I had a high school friend that went to work at the same time as a security officer for the local community college district. He was making less money and his job sucked big time. I worked for 30 years as a hospital security officer for about six different hospitals. I always made more money that he made. I worked 30 years and I ended up with a pension of $175.00 a month from the hospitals.
My friend worked 30 years and ended up with a very nice pension from the school district.
But I do not think he gets any money from Social Security because they did not pay into SS since they were paying into the school retirement plan. (I get $1100.00 a month from SS because I paid in and my employers paid into SS for me.)
Now there is also the issue of health insurance. We have always tried to make sure that our teachers, police officers, firefighters and others had good health insurance. Many good reasons for that.
For most of the years that I worked, in the private field, I had good health insurance and it did not cost me very much. But as health care cost got higher and higher the hospital started handing off the cost to their employees and cutting benefits.
So public/government workers now days may have good health care insurance. Hell, I am happy for them. All Americans should have good health care. It is the Republicans that want to protect health care insurance corporations and want to keep all Americans from having health care.
Do not blame unions for wanting to try and get health care for their members.
Now because of the mess that Republicans created by giving billions to the rich and not funding two wars and everything else they have done to hurt the United States … Do we have a mess and do the public workers need to pay more and get less in retirement and in health care? Yes, they might have to do that. In fact they have said they are willing.
Should we let Republicans and the right wing hatemongers take away the rights of public workers to have unions? Hell NO..
Just so we're clear here, we're not including politicians in the category of "skilled workers" right? I just need to get that straight in my head before I can swallow any of the other stuff. :)
Posted by: Argent009 | Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 04:24