This week has been rough. I was traveling for the first half, up at 3:30am to get home on Wednesday, and then had back to back days of 5am conference calls (in the Eastern/Mountain time zone throwdown, I clearly lost). So to be fair, I was in the right frame of mind to be broken. I was, at best, teetering on the edge of hissyfit for the back half of the week.
I got online before my early morning call on Friday, and quickly browsed through Twitter as I waited for the conference call to boot up. And that’s where I saw it: someone on Twitter saying they couldn’t be bothered to worry about government employees losing pay during the (possible) government shut down, as it was “about time they felt the effects of a bad economy just like everyone else.”
Uuuughhhh. Ok. So I (briefly) got into it (see above re 5am/impending conference call), and the thought was clarified that the writer felt that it was unfair for her to have to go through layoffs while government employees had unlimited job security, and, besides, they don’t work that hard anyway (I’m kind of paraphrasing that last part, but I find this overwhelmingly implied sense that people believe all government employees basically sit around and wait for retirement, wasting your hard-earned tax dollars on laziness and entitlement .)
I worked in the D.C. market for 10 years, and it’s impossible to not be in some way touched or related to the Federal government industry (Um, well, impossible if you work for a Federal government consulting firm, anyway. Ahem.) My job aside, I would say that a majority of the people I know in D.C. work for or with the government. The suggestion that these individuals have been living some kind of high life, immune to downturns in the economy, and that it’s time they got a taste for layoffs and hardships makes me batty.
Example: I have two good friends who work for government agencies: one is a pediatric oncologist who does research at FDA, the other is a lawyer for OMB. Do you have any idea how much money a pediatric oncologist could make doing drug research in the private sector? I believe the scientific measure of the difference between her earning potential in private sector vs. public is “a metric shit ton.” Same for my lawyer friend, who with her time and experience could have easily taken partner track at a law firm and be bathing in Le Mer every night. But they didn’t choose those roles, they chose to go into public service, to work for the government, and I promise you, they are not working fewer hours than you and I, they are no less immune to the rise in gas prices and plane tickets and crashing of the housing market. And I promise you, neither one of them were thinking “oh, gee, I hope the government shuts down, I could really use the time off” — they were thinking “Holy crap, if the government shuts down, how am I going to pay my mortgage this month?” If the increased job security they have over those in the private sector is one of the benefits they get for sacrificing a seriously significant earning potential, well: they deserve it. I personally seriously WANT the really really really smart doctor at the FDA making sure the drugs that get given to kids with cancer are safe. I want her to stay there, and keep doing her work, and not bail out to the private sector (a move I wouldn’t judge at all; I mean, I did.) And I don’t sit there and go “Oh, good, now those lazy government workers can get some perspective for what getting laid off feels like.”
And even if we take people like my friends out, and we are talking about the stereotypical government employee who sits at the post office and is purposefully unhelpful while they count the days to their retirement (and I would argue the number of people that fit this description is MUCH smaller than you would knee-jerk think): I still don’t want them to go without their salaries. Assuming, for a second, that most government employees are part of a major government works program: can you imagine the effect on the economy if all those people suddenly couldn’t pay their rent, mortgage, bills? My God, that would make 2008 seem like the good ole days.
So anyway, I was kind of working my way through all those thoughts on Twitter (really fun in a 140 characters, by the way), and then I see: “And military healthcare is just like welfare!”
And I short circuited and woke a day later, sputtering obscenities and twitching. The Internet (aside: are we capitalizing ‘Internet’ these days? Still?) officially broke me.
(PS: IT’S NOT WELFARE IT’S A BENEFIT FROM A WORKPLACE OH MY GOD)
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