Teachers, Secretaries and Social Workers: The New Welfare
Moms?

by Randy Albelda

Dollars and Sense
May/June 2011

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/0511albelda.html

Conservatives have had their sights on public-sector workers
for a while and for good reason. Public-sector workers
represent two favorite targets: organized labor and
government. I am a public-sector employee and union member,
so I can't help but take these attacks and struggles
personally. I am also a veteran of the welfare "reform"
battles of the 1990s, and the debates over public-sector
workers are strikingly similar.

Like welfare moms, public-sector workers have been painted
as greedy [fill-in-the-blank barnyard animals], feeding from
the public trough and targeted as the primary source of
what's wrong with government today.

Like 1990s welfare-reform debates, this one is dominated by
more fiction than fact. For example, previous and recent
research consistently shows public-sector workers actually
earn less than private-sector workers with comparable skills
and experience. While many, but not all, public-sector
workers who work long enough for the public sector have a
defined-benefit pension, the unfunded portions of those
pensions are often due to bad state policy, not union
negotiations.

In some states, like my own, Massachusetts, current workers
are paying most of their pension costs through their own
contributions into interest-bearing pension funds. Because
state and local governments with defined pensions do not
contribute to social security, there are currently cost
savings. The upshot is that the cost of pensions may not be
as high as some are arguing.

It is true that health-insurance costs for current retirees
are expensive and worrisome. But this is because of the
rising costs in private health insurance. Making workers pay
more for their health-care benefits will erode the
compensation base of public-sector workers, but it won't get
at the real problem of escalating health-care costs.

During the welfare debates, one of the arguments used to
justify punitive legislative changes was spun around the
fact that welfare moms who did get low-wage employment could
also get child-care assistance - while other moms could not.
Sound familiar? Public-sector workers do have employer-
sponsored benefits many private-sector workers no longer
get. But benefits haven't improved in the public sector over
the last 20 years; indeed most public-sector workers are
paying more for the same benefits.

Over the same period, many private-sector workers have been
stripped of their employer-provided benefits even as profits
have soared. Instead of asking why corporate America is
stripping middle-class workers of decent health-care
coverage and retirement plans, the demand is to strip
public-sector workers of theirs.

The new Cadillac-driving welfare queens are the handful of
errant politicians who game the pension system and a few
highly paid administrators getting handsome pensions. Sure
they exist, but are hardly representative. The typical
public-sector worker is a woman, most often working as a
teacher, secretary or social worker. Women comprise 60% of
all state and local workers (compared to their 47%
representation in the private work force). And those three
occupations make up 40% of the state and local work force.

Shaking down public-sector unions may make some feel better
about solving government fiscal problems, but the end result
will be more lousy jobs for educated and skilled workers. It
will also not stem the red ink that is causing states to
disinvest in much-needed human and physical infrastructure
with budget cuts. But eroding wages and benefits combined
with public-sector bashing will send a very loud market
signal to the best and brightest currently thinking about
becoming teachers, librarians, or social workers to do
something else.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walter is leading the attack on
public-sector workers today. In the 1990s it was another
Wisconsin governor, Tommy Thompson, who was a leader in
demanding and implementing punitive changes to his state's
welfare system. His plan became a model for the rest of the
states and federal welfare legislation in 1996. Then there
were horror stories and welfare bashing, but not much in the
way of discussing the real issue of decent paying jobs that
poor and low-income mothers on and off welfare needed to
support their families. The main result of welfare reform
was the growth in working-poor moms.

There is one important difference. Public-sector workers,
unlike welfare moms, have unions and a cadre of supporters
behind them.

[Randy Albelda is a professor of economics at the University
of Massachusetts-Boston and a Dollars & Sense Associate.]

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