As state lawmakers struggle to make “tough choices” to close budget gaps, tens of thousands of public employees find themselves with no choice but to watch their wages vanish.
Ohio, Maryland, California and other cash-strapped states are seeking to trim costs by imposing furloughs, which force government workers to stay off the job, without pay, often for days at a time. The logic seems to be that furloughs are easier to manage than laying off employees and rehiring when finances improve.
But to labor advocates, furloughs are just layoffs lite: balancing the budget on the backs of the very workers whom communities lean on to weather the recession.
In times like these, critics warn of the long-term economic costs of shelving the frontline staff who are needed to process public benefits, collect taxes, or keep schools operating. Yet fiscal emergencies are still driving many state governments to put a stranglehold on their human capital.
Volatility in the public sector aggravates the many perils facing the labor movement: In contrast to anemic union membership at private firms, government workplaces have traditionally been seen as a bulwark of union activism and collective-bargaining clout.
Earlier this month, a California court issued a favorable ruling in a lawsuit brought by the SEIU challenging the state’s furlough plans. The action helped protect jobs and provide back pay for several thousand professional and clerical government workers.
But the union-led litigation, which parallels similar legal challenges in other states, covers just a sliver of the massive furloughs and other cutbacks mandated by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Press-Enterprise reports from Sacramento that the budget crunch is plunging more state employees from relative security into unprecedented crisis:
Tens of thousands of state workers, including several thousand in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, continue to have three-day-a-month furloughs ordered by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The furloughs translate into nearly a 14 percent pay reduction.
Temporary state employees have lost their jobs. In school districts throughout the state, budget cuts have led to the layoffs of teachers and other school workers, resulting in larger class sizes and forcing the cancellation of electives and other programs.
Ken Jacobs of the University of California-Berkeley’s Labor Center, told the Press-Enterprise:
Members of public-sector unions have often traded earning less than they would in the private sector for job security and good benefits, both health and retirement… But like the private sector, we’ve seen layoffs.
The decline of once-solid public jobs could resonate heavily in the private workforce. Civil service unions may lose relevance as a model for active union organizing. Meanwhile in the labor market, public sector workplaces, from social welfare agencies to schools to courts, may lose even more ground to corporate jobs that attract new workers with heftier capital and prestige.
In terms of social costs, these patterns reveal demographic disparities in the impacts of public-sector destabilization. In a 2003 analysis of privatization trends among public workers, Immanuel Ness and Roland Zullo argue in Poverty & Race:
Displaced workers with highly marketable skills (e.g., managers, lawyers, computer programmers, engineers, and so forth) are more likely to find desirable positions in the private sector labor market…. However, such offers rarely extend to the whole workforce, and lesser-skilled public workers, in particular, face difficulties securing comparable employment once they enter the private sector labor market.
Chaos in the public sector may be a product of the current downturn, but it’s unclear whether government workers will ever recover, even after the economy starts to swing upward.
As both a symptom and a cause of government privatization and weakening unions, public employees are falling prey to the same market forces that have already consumed private workplaces.
The most dangerous aspect of this pattern may lie in what distinguishes public servants from other service workers: they run the programs and agencies that hold society together, and they’re more needed than ever when the private sector fails.
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Michelle Chen is a contributing writer at In These Times and The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent and a co-producer of the “Belabored” podcast. She studies history at the CUNY Graduate Center. She tweets at @meeshellchen.
