The attack on public employees is unrelenting.  Listening to public figures, one might think that all of our budget problems are due to the greed and laziness of employees at the city, state, and federal level.  A recent commentary in the Star Tribune by former Minnesota Governor and would-be President Tim Pawlenty stated that “Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt.”  Mr. Pawlenty complains that “the rise of government unions has been like a silent coup.”  Wow!  That sounds scary!

Thankfully, the facts don’t support the Governor.  Mark Brenner, writing in Labor Notes in December, tells us that “The Economic Policy Institute measured state and local public workers against their private sector counterparts with the same age, experience, and education. They found that public workers earn about 11 percent less.”  If we add in benefits, public employees still make almost 4 percent less than their counterparts in the private sector.

Are our taxes terribly high to pay for what we are supposed to believe are extravagant benefits?  No.  Brenner cites Citizens for Tax Justice telling us that “overall taxes in the U.S. are the third lowest among industrialized countries (only Turkey and Mexico are lower).”

Obviously, Mr. Pawlenty is running for President when he boasts “We proved that even in deep-blue Minnesota, taxpayers can take on big government and big labor and win.”  Hmm...  Wasn’t it the recently-departed Pawlenty who left Minnesota with a $6.2 billion budget deficit?  I guess he considers that “winning.”

We can see that most of what the Governor says is not true.  (And he’s not the only one saying it!)  But let’s say it were true.  Would the problem be that public workers were making too much?  That they had too much job security?  Too much dignity?  Or would the problem really be that workers in the private sector are making too little, have almost no job security, and are at the mercy of the market when it comes to health care and retirement?

Even if his facts were correct, the Governor has it backwards.  He wants to see a race to the bottom, a race which pits public workers against their brothers and sisters in the private sector.  Most workers, on the other hand, would love to see an economy that wasn’t a race at all, but a cooperative effort to get us all to the finish line with our dignity intact, while doing the good work that our country so badly needs done.

Mr. Pawlenty and his allies see two groups: One group is “public employees,” who are the cause of all of our problems.  The other group is composed of innocent “taxpayers,” who are being ripped off by the first group.  In the real world, we’re all workers, and we’re all taxpayers.  We need to worry less about the millionaires whose tax cuts are a big cause of the deficits we’re facing, and start worrying more about the private-sector workers who have been falling behind for the past several decades.

For more information that you can use to counter the demonization of public employees, check out the September 2010 report of the Economic Policy Institute.

Or check out the January issue of Labor Notes, particularly the article “Public Sector, Public Good.”