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Saturday, July 25, 2009

Columnist: State workers are 'crybabies'

If government workers caught in the middle of the state's budget impasse are looking for a little sympathy, they won't get it from Mary Young of the Reading Eagle.

Young says in her weekly column that state workers are a bunch of crybabies who are out of touch with economic conditions facing millions of Pennsylvanians.

Commenting on television ads from the unionized state workers complaining about missing a paycheck, Young says:
The crybabies forgot who was in the audience: nearly 550,000 unemployed Pennsylvanians, including as many as 20,000 whose unemployment benefits ran out this week.

There are probably a few million more who have had pay cuts and furloughs.

The state workers eventually will get all the pay they are owed. Workers not employed by the state will never recoup their lost wages.
Read the full column at the newspaper's Web site.

I've said this before: There is a tremendous disconnect between the people who work in Harrisburg (the governor and Legislature included) and the people who pay the bills. I'm not willing to go as far as Young and call state workers "crybabies" but I do agree with her that they're wasting their time trying to gain sympathy from private sector workers who have it worse off.

As Young points out in her column, state workers have better health coverage than the average Pennsylvania workers, they have guaranteed pensions (unlike the average worker who saw most of their retirement and investment savings disappear) and they have very little fear of layoffs.

A missed paycheck is bad, but being out of work for months or years is a lot worse. And having to pay more in taxes to support a bloated state government is not the way to go.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

State workers are automatons who will vote the way their unions tell them. So not only did Rendell stiff them for pay raises in his first term. They turned around and voted him in again. They get what they deserve and these sheep will continue to vote the way they are told. They are cry babies.