The aftermath of the snowstorm from my office window.
Hopefully by now you’ve dug yourself out of the snow/ice mess we found ourselves in this week. While I enjoy it from time to time, I think it should know its place and not interfere with our lives and important business.
But when it doesn’t, I’m reminded of the incredible job done by our public servants. While most people were bundled up at home with their families, our public works crews were out plowing, de-icing, and sanding the roads. When trees gave way to the weight, they were there to remove them. Despite the very real danger they faced in such conditions, they had a job and did it well.
Unfortunately emergencies also don’t stop when weather attacks. Police and fire units were still out keeping us safe from more direct harm during the storm. I know I felt better that despite conditions, someone would get to my pregnant sister should she need medical assistance. When even the Narrows Bridge posed a mortal danger to the lives of commuters, state troopers and transportation workers were there to assess the threat and take action.
Like so many of our weather events, utility workers at public and quasi-public companies had to fight the elements to keep our power on. This isn’t just a personal comfort issue any more, our economy depends upon it.
Even people you’d traditionally associate with office work had to be called into service with emergency management, disseminating important information, and just being there to pick up the phone.
In the end, a lot of very long hours and hard work by our public servants was the difference between inconvenience and disaster.
What’s my point? Since the start of this recession, attacks on public employees have grown rapidly – particularly in and around the Tea Party. They’ve portrayed our public servants as lazy or thuggish and living off the “productive class” in the private sector. We’ve balanced our budgets on their backs but some people still seem to take joy in laying-off even more. The implicit and sometimes explicit assumption is that they’re not worth the money we pay them as taxpayers.
Even though our employee guilds could probably tell you I’ve disagreed with them at the margins, by and large we get enormous value from the job they do. We might notice it more in weeks like this, but people don’t really think about it when they turn on their faucet on or flush their toilet and water comes out.
We even see it in our newspapers demanding that government tighten its belt just like families have had to. With apologies to journos, who happen to be another underpaid and under-appreciated class of workers, this analogy is idiotic. Cutting a government budget is nothing like eating out less or cutting your cable bill. These are services we need as a society. Some of them are even the result of people being unable to keep up with their own family budget. In fact, in most cases the cuts just do more economic damage. Most people aren’t even aware that it’s largely been government cuts holding our economic growth back.
For some reason the people who actually are overpaid, actually did cause this recession, and provide our economy with little value – Wall Street – have managed to turn regular workers against each other. That’s not to say that we should ever hand public unions and guilds the keys to the treasury. There are isolated examples of this around the country and it never ends well for anyone. It’s important that we compensate fairly within market – not more or less. But the demonization of the people who serve us that has to stop.
We’ve been buried recently in studies of Finland’s education system because ours is rapidly decaying while theirs is ostensibly the best. Groups with varying agendas have learned a lot of lessons, usually that suit their agenda, but there is one critical difference between their schools and ours that is pretty simple. They treat their teachers with more respect. People aspire to become teachers in Finland, not just because of the pay, but because it is a high status job. As a result, their “best and brightest” become educators.
If we want to have great government, we can’t continue to treat the people who work in it as though they are burdens on society. Thank them for their hard work, or maybe share how it made a positive impact on your life. I guarantee they’ll appreciate it.
Update 1/21 11:01am: My friend Andrew Austin from the Transportation Choices Coalition noticed a rather obvious omission…. transit workers. It wasn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, but public transit is always bailing commuters out when the weather gets nasty and manage to keep people safe in the process.
Scridb filter
