The Empire Page

Public employees and private employees. In a recent Time magazine article they were quoted as saying, “The long recession has cast a glaring light on the fact that public and private workers increasingly live in separate economies.”

In my humble opinion, there is no valid for this disparity. Private workers live in the real work of business and state employees live in a kind of fantasy world. In a bad economy, private workers worry about getting laid off. They worry about taking a large cut in salary in order not to get laid off and to keep the company they work for in business.

In the same bad economy, public employees have had no worries of being laid off. They have had no worries of suffering a salary cut; until now. Governor Paterson has been proposing both layoffs and/or give backs of salary increases. Welcome to the real world public employees.

New York State (NYS) is in the midst of one of the worst economic periods in history and is facing budget deficits of $9.2 billion this year and double or triple that in the next two years. NYS is some of the highest taxes in the country for both businesses and individuals. Those taxes are one of the main reasons NYS has been losing businesses and individuals to other states.

It’s clear that increasing taxes is a further death knell for NYS. The only option is to decrease expenses. Governor Paterson is working with the Legislature at this moment to find areas to decrease spending. One of those areas has to be the cost of the state workforce. It has been the focus of almost every other state in the country that is facing huge budget deficits. And in many states, the public unions have agreed to give back salary increases to avoid layoffs. In many other states they have laid off substantial numbers of employees and reduced salaries. NYS has done neither. Bulletin to NYS employees: The Fantasy bubble you have been living in is about to burst, if not this year then surely in the next when there is a new sheriff coming to town in the name of Andrew Cuomo.

In my humble opinion, there is no valid reason why public employees should not share in the pain right alongside every other working New Yorker as we suffer through, and recover from, this pathetic economy we are experiencing.

Your thoughts.

 Douglas Boettner

Doug.boettner@gmail.com