5 Reasons Public Employees Make Such Tempting Political Targets

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Public sector employment, however, remained in sustained freefall as tax revenues cratered. Nearly three quarter of a million jobs were lost since 2009. Public sector jobs traditionally held by women have been targeted for elimination, particularly teaching jobs. (Nearly 75 percent of public school teachers are women.) Since the recession, more than 350,000 teachers have lost their jobs. According to Susan Feiner, a University of Southern Maine economist, the Washington, D.C.-based National Women's Law Center reports that,

While women represented 57 percent of the public-sector work force at the end of the recession, women lost the vast majority--79 percent--of the 327,000 jobs cut in this sector between July 2009 and February 2011….

The figures for African-American workers tell a similar story. Between 2008 and 2010, 21 percent of black workers were employed in the public sector (at the federal, state or local level), compared to 16 percent of non-black workers. One study found that while black workers represented about 13 percent of state and local public sector employment, 20 percent of job losses in those areas were suffered by black workers. As many as 177,000 jobs were lost by black public workers, potentially representing billions in lost income.

Rather than going after public workers because of their supposed power, state legislatures seem instead to be localizing the pain of austerity among groups with less political power.

5. Undervaluing “Care Work”

Public employees may also be tantalizing targets for austerity measures because of the undervaluing of labor-intensive care work. When home healthcare, childcare, social work, eldercare, and education are paid it is often the government that foots the bill, particularly because the recipients are often those who can least afford private options. But whereas the loss of manufacturing and infrastructure jobs is endlessly lamented, care work remains somewhat invisible both in its execution and its elimination.

Yet care work is immensely valuable. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston estimated that, in Massachusetts alone, unpaid care work amounted to $151.6 billion, the equivalent of 30 percent of the state’s GDP. When childcare workers, eldercare workers, or social workers are fired, the assumption is not that vulnerable people don’t need care, but that we expect someone to provide that care for free. That these services are traditionally provided by women is no coincidence. Centuries of free female labor kept our society together, but the economic value of that work is largely hidden from the conversation.

Ultimately, the fact remains that while low investment returns and tanking revenues have caused some accounting concerns for pensions, they remain relatively well funded—the unfunded liabilities are approximately 2 percent of total liabilities over the pay-out period. The benefits paid out are fairly modest, with about $24,000 the median—even in places like Detroit, where the recent bankruptcy filing was blamed in part on pension troubles. Public employees, by dint of their legal susceptibilities and historical marginalization are victims, not causes, of states’ current economic turmoil. Demanding that they accept responsibilities for those crises is backward.