America’s Public Employees: Live Like Slaves, Die Like Dogs

By Jordan Barab @ 6:00 pm You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor. So often we over look the worth and significance of those who are not in the professional jobs, in the so called big jobs, but let me say to you tonight, that when ever you are engaged in work, that serves humanity, for the building of humanity it has dignity and it has worth." – Dr. Martin Luther King, March 18, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee

The New York state legislature passed a bill last week by a vote of 194-1 to modify the state’s notorious "Taylor Law" that makes it illegal for public employees to strike. The Taylor law currently penalizes workers two days wages for every day on strike, high fines for the union and jail time for union leaders.

It is a little known fact in this country that there are two classes of workers: private sector employees who have a federally guaranteed right to form unions, bargain with their employers and work in a safe workplace. Then there are the second class citizens: public employees — particularly people who work for states, counties and cities — who do not have a federally guaranteed right to bargain collectively under the National Labor Relations Act or to work safely under OSHA. Those rights have to be provided on a state by state basis. Only 25 states and the District of Columbia have passed comprehensive public-sector labor-relations laws which provide collective bargaining rights to public employees at state and local levels. Only 26 states give public employees the right to a safe workplace.

Even those rights are often not equivalent to private sector rights. Most don’t have the right to strike — the most powerful tool that workers have to stand up to the huge institutions that employ them — and other states limit the areas they can bargain over. Federal employees, for example, as well as many state, county and municipal workers are not allowed to bargain over wages or benefits. Collective begging replaces collective bargaining.

But why should public employees have the same rights that private sector employees have?

Aren’t they pretty much just bureaucrats who work in nice clean offices with cushy benefits?

Hardly.

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