Houblog

I can’t help but read the comments formerly posted to the unofficial blog of the NY transit strike, and see a theme that appears here in Houston also. It’s the same old equation: Public sector union greed + public indifference = collision. No one wins.

Thanks to Dartblog, the comments have been saved, even though the original blog tried to sanitize them. As I read through the first dozen or so comments, all of them fell into the expected molds:

Public: “You’re greedy bastards! And don’t you realize that Public Servant = Public Slave? Now get back to work; you’re making things inconvenient for me!”
Workers: “You just don’t understand what we go through! Waaaaahhhhh!”

Or in their own words:

“when you self righteous people have to go to your jobs and endure people spitting at you,assaulting you, cursing at you and simply hating you for having enough sense to take the test to get our jobs than you have aright to your misguided opinions.oh yeah how about when you go to work, is there anybody taking a piss a few feet from you or maybe some pervert playing with himself. how about your bosses do they write you up for wearing scarves in the winter time or maybe take you off the job because your top button on your shirt is not buttoned? you opinion filled people have no idea what we go through on a daily basis. at least firemen,teachers, cops and even sanitation are respected for what they do.”

and on the flip side, three quotes.

“I think you all probably deserve the raise but this is no way to get it! When you pledge to be a public servant you do so above your own personal needs.

Who are you to take well-paying jobs (for your education levels) serving millions of people and then hold us hostage by striking?

Which part of PUBLIC SERVANT did you not understand?

These serve to counterpoint–and prove– the single best of the early comments (sorry, but I’m not reading all 722 to pull out the gems!):

A question to all who condemn the strike should be: would you take this job, at their pay and conditions? If not, why not?

I think we all know the real answer is of class superiority, disparity and complete apathy towards laborers who clearly are not by any means wealthy or close to it. To condemn these people wanting a fair shake for both new and current members is a shameful day in which the next strategy of the government would presumably be to privatize it.
(Emphasis added–ubu)

Now take that question, and apply it to the wages I posted for jobs in the City of Houston yesterday. Add to that, the recent moves by the SEIU to aggressively organize city workers (after years of benign neglect by the current union AFSCME) and their, er, overly enthusiastic support for Sue Lovall, successful candidate for City Council. Is Houston headed for a New York/California-style collision of the public sector with the public interest? Maybe . The elements are there or assembling themselves. Very disgruntled employees; low pay, cuts in benefits, no future, no respect. An apathetic/blind public, uncaring about the situation of the public sector employees. A powerful and determined union, albeit without the general support of the employees — so far.

I won’t cut the public any slack for it’s attitude towards public sector employees. Too many times, people equate “Public Sector” with “Public Slave.” And there is a strong attitude towards city/government employees as the products of job programs; i.e.: they couldn’t hold a real job so they got hired by the government. I know when I tried to break out several years ago, it was damn near hopeless. You could watch the interviewer reading down the resume for the first time,* and asking questions; then they would reach the part about current employement.

Boom. You could see it in their posture, and often their face, and tenor of their questions–rarely did they bother to conceal it. “What the hell did they send me a city employee for? Nobody is going to hire someone who’s been with the city that long!” Sometimes, they weren’t that restrained.

Nor is the general public much better. I’ve had people break off conversations and walk away upon finding out I’m a public sector employee. I’ve had women remark to their friends (right in front of my face!) “Oh, honey, you wouldn’t be interested in him, he works for the city–he doesn’t have any money!” I mean damn. That’s just harsh.

It’s also true, but I made that point already, yesterday.

On the flip side, I’m not going to cut the employees or the unions any slack either. The last thing this city needs is to end up like New York or California, with powerful public sector unions dictating a fiscally suicidal policy to the employer. I might be the only employee in all of Houston to hold this view, but I don’t believe in public sector unions. I supported Reagan when he fired the PATCO strikers and broke that union over 20 years ago, and my opinion hasn’t changed on that matter since, even if I am a government employee now: Government employees have got no business belonging to unions as they exist today. A public sector union should be no more than a method of streamlining feedback & communication from employees to the politicians who ultimately run the system. That job cannot be left to the managers and directors, because it provides for too much insulation and the top bureaucrats end up with all the power, because without an alternative channel, they control the flow of information from the rank and file to the politicians. (Information flow is power. Just ask CBS.)

After almost 20 years with the city, I have reached the conclusion that there’s really two areas that the mythical “average city employee” lacks, compared to a private sector counterpart. However, I’m going to save that for a related post that I’ve been tinkering with for some time now. Look for it some time after Christmas, entitled, “What’s Wrong With City Employees?”

In the meantime, you might want to tune to KTRH AM 740 at 10 am–noon today, as councilmember Michael Berry will be discussing unions, the MTA strike, and what it means to Houston. Listen here.

A lot has been made of the fact that city employees get to retire on 90% of their pay, with donations of only 4% (now 5%) of their pay. What the press never got around to reporting last year during the pension mess, was that employee pay stinks. It stinks like the stuff the Solid Waste department or Republic Waste and Overbilling Services hauls off. Well ok, maybe not like the taxpayer money the latter hauled off recently, but then it sort of had its own stink.

In a recent article about the Controller’s audit into Republic, I mentioned in passing that we had problems hiring qualified applicants at $18k per year to haul garbage off. This probably has a lot to do with why we privatized. Wait, let’s rephrase that. It probably has a lot to do with the justification used to push the privatization. I have a hard time believing that a private company could get more and better people to do the same crappy work without paying them a whole lot more. (Which makes one wonder if what Republic was really doing was overbilling the city to pay for the higher wages it had to pay. No way to know, and I can’t even confirm what it pays employees — oddly, their website lacks a “Careers with Republic” link. . . (Heh.)

But I can show what the city pays. For a Solid Waste Driver “Salary Range - Pay Grade 6 $617 - $810 Biweekly $16,042-21,060 Annually” But hey, who cares, it’s garbage! Nobody’s going to pay a lot to have it hauled off. But don’t you just love the part where it says “WORKING CONDITIONS: There are occasional exposures to extreme levels of temperature, air pollution, noise, chemical gasses and substances and/or contagious diseases or physical trauma conditions of a short-term nature, such as broken bones or temporary loss of sight or hearing.”

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The Dallas county Sherrif’s department has seriously disappointed me. I had an article almost ready to post earlier about it, but the browser glitched and swallowed my post. Since then, I’ve seen Michelle Malkin’s post about how the MSM is up to it’s usual tricks. “All the news that’s fitted to print,” indeed. Only this time it’s the WSJ up to no good.

I wanted to reference that post before resuming with the story I saw in the Chronicle for a reason. Journalism, as performed in the mainstream media, is dead. As if the ghoulish maniac in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had gotten a job as a news anchor, the current crop of so-called reporters and editors wear the skin of journalism’s heyday like an ill-fitted trophy. Amidst all the petulant whining about blogs and self-congratulation for the wonderful job they do, they have failed to notice that the reason they’re zombies is that they report like them. Not like people who care about the subjects they are reporting on. Reporting should be half-education. Instead, it’s 100% showmanship. The ratings race and the almighty dollar have helped political and personal bias in the info-tainment industry destroy what’s left of the MSM’s creditability.
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I’ve been planning an article on Baytown’s treatment of its employees who evac’d ahead of Rita for some time. Now word comes today that the City of Houston is also firing employees who left during the emergency. So are there differences between the two? And what are they?

The City of Baytown and its Public Works superintendant Mark LeBlanc have decided to show the peons what it meant to work for the Baron. “Thou shalt be at thy post at all times.” The number of firings now stands at 12 (no, wait, really, it’s only 11) most from the PW dept., but there may have been others. Channel 11 did the usual media
BS, concentrating on one person’s story in order to portray what they wanted, and thereby leaving more questions than answers. The Baytown Sun has been a little more thorough, but not a lot.

Baytown, in the person of Deputy City Manager Bob Leiper, is claiming that a clause involving mandatory overtime in the job description of every employee was sufficient notice that they were essential personnel. The problem with that is, even so, you have to tell an employee when he is expected to show up for the overtime. Did the City of Baytown? Apparently, in several cases, it did not.

It gets worse. The law is plain on this matter. Employers cannot fire employees for failing to report to work during a mandatory evacuation unless that person is essential and they provide a shelter for the employee during the storm. Frankly, it’s the last that’s going to bite the City in it’s ass; Leiper is going to have to show that Baytown had designated such a facility and that it could reasonably be expected to survive a Cat 5 storm with a 20-foot storm surge, which is what was expected at the time. I’d bet there aren’t two dozen structures in the entire metro area that could do that. (HP has one — they were enjoying catered BBQ at their shelter.) Well, the storm surge is easy, be well inland. Like more than 30 miles, because that didn’t work for parts of Cameron Parish, when Rita struck as a Cat 3. And “inland’ doesn’t exactly describe Baytown.

It defies reason to think that these people would have been fired had Rita come ashore in Galveston as a Cat 5 hurricane, but then, I’ve seen a lot of reason defying BS since Katrina dropped in to visit New Orleans. The trick is, Baytown is claiming that all city employees are essential. Total hogwash. During a hurricane and evacuation, how many people are going to:

1. Pay parking tickets.
2. Visit the library.
3. File a construction application.
4. Need their water meter read.
5. Call about a utility bill.
6…. oh you get the picture.

Citizen reaction in Baytown was entirely predictible. A few stood up to sayYawn. “Those meanies!” But mostly, a vast yawning indifference. Then people wonder why they only get served by rude, uncaring, unmotivated employees at City Hall. Somthing about binding the mouths. . . .

So isn’t the City of Houston doing the same thing? They’re firing people for not showing up. Well, yes and no. The difference in Houston’s case, it’s firing only emergency service providers. Fire, police, and dispatch personnel. Now granted, some or all of these lived in the evac areas. But in Houston’s case, all personnel are informed ahead of time if they are considered essential. So you know beforehand that if a disaster hits, you’re stuck at work. Lets take KHOU’s poster child for unfortunate events:

Tonya Locks works at HEC taking calls from people needing help but when Rita was coming, she says she needed help because she’s the sole provider for her family.

That family lives in one of those zip codes and includes a sick grandmother.

“Basically I should have abandoned my family and been at my job,” she says.

If that’s the case, then the questions become:

1. Why did the employee choose to live in such an area? (Granted, this isn’t entirely a fair question–hang on).
2. Knowing that one is an essential personnel, and living in an evac zone, why would the employee fail to make alternate arrangements with family and friends?
3. Finally, if one is stuck living in such an area, and has no one they can rely on to deal with their own family while they perform essential tasks, why the hell did they take the job anyway?

What the hell is a sole provider doing taking an essential emergency services personnel job??? I have to agree with the final poster in a thread over at the Baytown Sun’s forums, Politically Incorrect:

This reminds me of mothers protesting their children being sent to Iraq earlier in the war…they insisted the kids joined the military to get an education and never expected actual active duty and thought it was unfair they had to gok (sic) to war!

While his first paragraph is full of “that’s the way it i, so who cares, it’s their job” tripe, this paragraph is spot on. Bean counters and meter readers aren’t essential personnel, and to force them to be at their post on the specious argument that there might be some use for them in some emergency capacity that they are utterly untrained and unsuited for is just ridiculous. Yeah, lets send my diabetic co-worker out to pull folks out of floodwaters, why don’t we?

So where does that leave us? Hurricanes are a given. Flooding is a given. So, should the City of Houston prohibit its employees from living in evac zones? (Break here for gales of laughter.) Riiiiiiiight. Let’s all move to the Woodlands. As if we could afford it. Please, let me assure you, the pay scale for City employees is not all it’s cracked up to be. As I pointed out way, way back when I started this blog, a 90% pension of City pay isn’t a hell of a lot. (And I for one will have to work something like 40 years with the city to get it).

What I’m getting at here is that a helluva lot of us live in flood-prone areas because it’s cheaper to do so. So if the City demands that all of it’s employees, or even all of it’s essential employees live in areas not likely to suffer flooding during a hurricane (and hey, when a Cat 5 is bearing down on your city, flooding is not the only problem), it would hamstring itself. They can’t afford to do so — so they’re simply not going to get jobs with the City.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a better way to go about this. The City of Houston should devote serious thought to a policy of not hiring single parents in essential non-first response positions. Police and Fire protection are serious jobs, and in a perfect world, they would all be able to take care of us, the citizens, while having someone at home to take care of their family in a regional emergency. But this world isn’t perfect and the pool of qualified people willing to wear the badge (or carry the axe, or hypodermic) is not so deep that we can afford to hamstring ourselves by extending such a restriction to them. Even if we did, what happens in case of a divorce or death of the other spouse? “Sorry, but you’re off the force because we can’t depend on you.” I don’t think so.

But for dispatchers and other essential personnel, it may very well be, and the City should consider establishing a policy of requiring the employee to attest yearly that there is a person willing and able to take responsibility for their family in such case, even to the point of requiring the other person’s signature. At the very least, that is going to make the employee understand in no uncertain terms that essential means essential.

As for Baytown, do I think its citizens should care? Hell yes! Outraged is more like it. Especially the way it has been handled, with employees not knowing in advance if they were considered essential. Think about it. . . would you sign on with an employer who treated their employees in that manner? And would you be particularly motivated to put out 100% effort (or even 80% and coast on the rest).

Then why would anyone else?