Hail Bureaucrats!

Mark Yost wrote a piece in the PiPress assailing the state's Public Employee unions for their lawsuit against the state, which opposes the use of prison labor on state jobs.

It was indeed a pithy piece:

If you've driven Minnesota's highways during the summer, you're familiar with the hard-working, altruistic public servants the union is defending. There's usually five or six of them standing around drinking coffee, ogling the buxom flag girl in short shorts, while the one college kid on the crew works his tail off and you inch your way through the egregiously misnamed "work zone." It's ironic, but true, that state employees are probably the one group that make prisoners look sympathetic.

State offices — particularly licensing bureaus — seem to attract people who do little work, are slow about it when they do, nasty about it when you don't kiss their pinky ring, and seem to never go away.

The piece isn't a slam on state or unionized employees as much as it is against the culture of entitlement that so many of these people seem to have developed.

They seem to have responded.

May 4, 2005

TO: St. Paul Pioneer Press

FROM: Eliot Seide,
Executive Director – AFSCME Minnesota Council 5, AFL-CIO

Dear Pioneer Press :

Mr. Yost's raging rant against state employees, airline mechanics, teachers, and unions is one of the most repulsive, inaccurate, and disgusting diatribes that I have ever seen. His personal and stereotypical attack meant to dehumanize and demean Minnesota 's hard-working state employees, airline mechanics, and teachers is beneath contempt.

Diatribe? It was more of a jape.

But we digress:

Perhaps Mr.Yost should have joined me at the Workers' Memorial Day event that was held at DOT offices in Roseville last week to commemorate those Department of Transportation employees who have died on the job maintaining Minnesota 's roads and bridges. There have been 29 DOT employees killed doing Minnesota 's work. Twenty of those everyday heroes were AFSCME members. Maybe Mr. Yost should have talked to the widow of our latest casualty, a Transportation Specialist who, last year, died in the line of duty, as she recounted his life, a life worth living in the service of others, something that neither Mr. Yost or the Taxpayers' League understands or respects.

So many strawmen and just-plain-wrong facts, so little time.

DOT workers are killed on the job all the time. It's a tragedy, indeed. But isn't calling the deaths "in the line of duty" just a tad overdramatic? We use that description when servicepeople and police are killed - because their "duty" compels them to go into dangerous places to defend their country and fight crime.

But OK, let's not quibble; every worker that's killed in traffic accidents on the job is a tragedy. However, look at the union website; Elliot Seide splashes the picture of him talking with the widow of an accident victim above his shrill, petty response to Yost. Seide exploits the tragedy of others to support what is, essentially, a suit to try to strongarm the state into firing the convicts and hiring union labor to clean the highways.

This is reprehensible.

Yost, by the way, served in the US Marine Corps, so I'd suspect he's noddingly familiar with "service". Someone should pass the word to Mr. Seide; check your facts.

Onward:

For at least twenty years, the Department of Transportation and the Union have cooperated on various efforts to appropriately and responsibly use Sentence-to-Serve crews. This cooperation has been non–partisan and survived through Democratic, Republican, and Independent administrations. The two main criteria have always been to make sure that no permanent, law abiding, taxpaying full-time breadwinners were displaced or replaced by prison labor, and that the safety and security of the driving public were not compromised.

And I think you'll notice that Yost wasn't calling for any changes in either of these.

But this administration has deliberately chosen not to meet and confer with the Union and instead chose to act arrogantly and arbitrarily to ignore the professionals who deliver services and to sacrifice public safety for their own public relations needs.

Er, the lawsuit would seem to seek to fire the convicts - who have been cleaning Minnesota's highways for a long time - and replace them with new union positions (stop me if I'm wrong here).

How much sympathy will the Minnesota taxpayer - whose kids' schools are being starved at the classroom level by a rapacious teacher's union and administrators who are cynically shorting the programs that most directly affect the taxpayers - have for paying fourteen times more to have their highways cleaned?

Noted in advance: not all state workers are indolent martinets. But neither Mark Yost or I are the first to observe that state and government employ seems to draw a lot of:

• people who thrive on lording petty authority over "customers", from clerks at state offices to the agents of county Child Support offices
• people whose vocational goal is to have a secure grip on the same chair for an entire career, no matter what

Most of us in the private sector don't have either of those as options (although it happens); it's not unreasonable to expect the taxpayer to blanche at the thought of being compelled to fund more of either.

We, the people of Minnesota and the United States, are concerned that prison labor in China undermines trade agreements and makes American manufacturing non-competitive.

Read that last bit very carefully; this union official is equating Minnesota's prison work program - a reward for good time, and a key part of the notion of "rehabilitation" - with slave labor.

With Minnesota prisoners doing not only garbage pick-up but commercial printing, light textile industrial production, and production of mylar party balloons (with Mickey and Minnie logos), work that could be done by Minnesotans in our ever diminishing manufacturing sector, shouldn't every Minnesotan want a little light on this growing convict industry? After all, the job you save may be your own.

Yost has the goods on MINNCOR; the simple fact is, such jobs would not go to Minnesotans still imprudent enough to have hung their hats in the manufacturing industry; they'd be in Mexico, China, or elsewhere farther down the world's market.

Minnesota's state workforce (the 13th leanest in the nation) is your neighbors, your friends, your family. They plow and maintain your roads, keep your lakes stocked, protect you from fraud at the gas pump, help your kids get registered for higher education and keep your higher education buildings clean and safe, take care of those with developmental disabilities and mental illness, protect the public from the states most violent criminals and predators, and make sure you have fair and free elections - to name just a few things they do. They deserve your respect and your thanks.

With all due respect, thanks.

Now, quit slacking off on the job, quit acting like the world revolves around the petty regulations you enforce with such zeal-yet-ennui, and quit digging for more reasons to raise taxes.

And most of all, quit demonizing those among us who seek to hold you - and more importantly, your legislative and bureaucratic masters - accountable for the money you extract from us.

Maybe you should call Mr. Yost, your state representative, and the Governor and tell them that. Or better yet, since Mr. Yost is so fond of prison labor, he should know that prisoners love to write and have plenty of time to do so. Maybe a prisoner could replace him as Associate Editor of the Pioneer Press. Just a thought...

Careful, Mr. Seide. There's a of prisoners who are adept at getting money from people who don't want to give it up.

Perhaps they could run AFSCME Council Five.

Just a thought...

Posted by Mitch at May 8, 2005 10:49 AM | TrackBack