Scranton, Pennsylvania—-the notoriously dumpy/depressing rust belt armpit that is the setting of NBC’s The Office—-is now famous for an entirely different reason. They have become the first city in the country to slash 400 government employees pay down to minimum wage. [That’s 7.25 an hour, otherwise known as “a joke” for a working adult to be offered so little.]
That’s right, public works employees (the folks fixing the potholes), firefighters (the people putting out your house fires or saving you from certain death), and cops (the officers keeping you from getting murdered) are now making a lower wage than a Wal-Mart cashier with no high school diploma. Someone could quit the fire department this morning and go make more at the drive-thru window at McDonald’s by the end of the day. The same cops protecting you from crime could make more money breaking into your house. This is not what anyone with two brain cells would call an encouraging trend.
What’s even worse is that all this seems to be the work of the town’s mayor, Christopher Doherty, who more or less unilaterally decided to slash workers pay down to the minimum wage or, as Republicans keep calling it in that bloodless way they have of justifying starvation wages, “budget cuts.” He’s hiding behind the fact that he also slashed his own pay to minimum wage but who really believes that a mayor’s salary is his only means of compensation? Being the mayor of a town benefits an individual in a hundred different ways, from the small (do you think he ever has to pay for his lunch?) to the big (most mayors of small cities have side businesses in construction or real estate where being mayor directly benefits them). His actual salary is a pittance compared to the other ways the job benefits him.
No, what I’m worried about isn’t the mayor’s salary, it’s the struggling government employees who were already in dire need of a raise. And what I’m really worried about is that this could create a domino effect. You see, people that wouldn’t fight for their unions in the last couple years are seeing just how little power they have without them. Pennsylvania law forbids the government employees in Scranton from striking…so they essentially have no power to fight against these drastic cuts, the largest in the city’s history.
This could create ripple effects all across Pennsylvania and the entire country in a Scott Walker-world where unions are just asked to take it without any real power to turn the tide. The Grover Norquists and Tea Parties of the world have been so successful at getting people to believe that government employees are moochers and bums that fewer people than ever truly even understand how badly they need government or how awful this is. The “Libertarians” or fiscal conservatives have essentially become anarchists that not only want all government employees to be paid minimum wage…but want the minimum lowered as well. But what’s an ideological win for them looks an awful lot like hell to anyone with a functioning sense of reality.
Great blog post. These are deplorable conditions, and the unilateralism is highly suspect. Unions were started to combat this issue–to collectively press for equitable treatment. It appears that they have no political recourse at this point. Frightening. Thanks for posting.