The Government as Guarantor of Income Now and Tomorrow
I admit that I am generally not on the side of labor, try as I might to understand their position. I hope I could be described as "enlightened" as a managerial type, in that I get that it's just bad business to treat your workers like crap, whether work conditions or pay/benefits or supervisory interactions. So it's not like I'm evil and think labor can just be walked all over and underappreciated and all. It's just that sometimes their demands seem unreasonable to me, given how our economy works in this country now.
Let me give you a couple of examples. Earlier this summer, I attended a breakfast at Temple University that was hosted by the City of Philadelphia for private developers. Outside, union members were protesting the mayor's plan to consolidate three somewhat overlapping housing agencies into one unit. The union members were worried about people losing jobs in this consolidation, so they made their presence known as local officials arrived for the conference. Some of them even started chanting, "No Justice, No Peace!" I had to shake my head. When times change and things need to get reorganized, we can be merciful and smart in how we downsize our workforce -- that's just common sense, whether public or private sector. But it doesn't mean that laying people off is necessarily an unjust act. What seems more unjust, given that our local government exists to serve us taxpayers, is for inefficient organizations of agencies and unnecessary staff positions to be left alone. While a government job is not at-will ( i.e you can't be unceremonially fired, except for grievous offenses), neither is it an entitlement that is immune to market forces and change.
Second, in yesterday's paper, there was a picture of some New Jersey state workers protesting, as Governor Corzine has furloughed them during the state's current government shutdown to get a balanced budget passed. One was wearing a shirt that said, "Every worker deserves a secure pension." Is that really true? And is the government's job to provide that pension? (Maybe in Sweden or France.) My understanding of pensions is that they are basically deferred salary: income you get after you're done working rather than while you're working. Of course, I've grown up in an era where defined contribution plans are more prevalent than defined benefit, so the notion of a benevolent employer paying me from the day I quit working to the day I die seems odd to me. If you want to be the kind of company/country that does that, good for you and that's something that'll make your company/country attractive. But the notion that it is a right for workers to draw a pension for life is something I'm just not comfortable with. It's a good thing our accounting standards are moving us towards governments more fully fund their pension funds, as fiscally painful as that is for governments to do, or else our children would be seeing most of their tax dollars go towards workers and work that took place when they were in diapers.
Don't get me wrong: drawing an income from a job today and a pension tomorrow are good things. No one should be denied the right to earn such an income. But neither should people feel entitled for the government to automatically provide it. After all, what are we, Northern Europe?
Let me give you a couple of examples. Earlier this summer, I attended a breakfast at Temple University that was hosted by the City of Philadelphia for private developers. Outside, union members were protesting the mayor's plan to consolidate three somewhat overlapping housing agencies into one unit. The union members were worried about people losing jobs in this consolidation, so they made their presence known as local officials arrived for the conference. Some of them even started chanting, "No Justice, No Peace!" I had to shake my head. When times change and things need to get reorganized, we can be merciful and smart in how we downsize our workforce -- that's just common sense, whether public or private sector. But it doesn't mean that laying people off is necessarily an unjust act. What seems more unjust, given that our local government exists to serve us taxpayers, is for inefficient organizations of agencies and unnecessary staff positions to be left alone. While a government job is not at-will ( i.e you can't be unceremonially fired, except for grievous offenses), neither is it an entitlement that is immune to market forces and change.
Second, in yesterday's paper, there was a picture of some New Jersey state workers protesting, as Governor Corzine has furloughed them during the state's current government shutdown to get a balanced budget passed. One was wearing a shirt that said, "Every worker deserves a secure pension." Is that really true? And is the government's job to provide that pension? (Maybe in Sweden or France.) My understanding of pensions is that they are basically deferred salary: income you get after you're done working rather than while you're working. Of course, I've grown up in an era where defined contribution plans are more prevalent than defined benefit, so the notion of a benevolent employer paying me from the day I quit working to the day I die seems odd to me. If you want to be the kind of company/country that does that, good for you and that's something that'll make your company/country attractive. But the notion that it is a right for workers to draw a pension for life is something I'm just not comfortable with. It's a good thing our accounting standards are moving us towards governments more fully fund their pension funds, as fiscally painful as that is for governments to do, or else our children would be seeing most of their tax dollars go towards workers and work that took place when they were in diapers.
Don't get me wrong: drawing an income from a job today and a pension tomorrow are good things. No one should be denied the right to earn such an income. But neither should people feel entitled for the government to automatically provide it. After all, what are we, Northern Europe?
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