Strange Bedfellows
Not often will you see Wall Street CEOs and public employee unions mentioned in the same sentence, but in the recession drama playing out in California and across the United States, they are linked by taxpayers’ dollars.
Wall Street CEOs have been taking taxpayers money so that their companies will survive, and then turning around and paying large bonuses. They’ll tell you they are not using the bailout money for the bonuses, but without the bailout money, there would be no other money to pay the bonuses.
The public employee unions also want taxpayer money to pay their members in full without making concessions during these hard economic times. Three California public employee unions have filed lawsuits charging that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger cannot furlough workers for two days a month to help the state weather the fiscal storm. As I discussed a couple of weeks ago, another public employee group even called for the Governor’s impeachment over the furlough demand.
We’re trading down in the job market
California’s highest-skilled and best paying jobs have been steadily eroding, and are being replaced by government employment. While many government jobs provide competitive wages, they do not produce anywhere near the economic benefit and societal wealth that the very best private jobs provide.
The three best-paying, highest-skilled industries in California are the information, financial services and manufacturing sectors, which pay average annual salaries of $90,000, $69,000 and $64,000, respectively. Government jobs on average pay $55,000.
Since 1990, those three high-value industries have lost more than 400,000 jobs in California. During that same period, the government sector has more than filled the void, adding more than 450,000 jobs.
Stormy Monday: Let the Layoffs Roll
Mental health professionals say there are a handful of things that can happen that can really knock you off your perch and leave you lying, severely wounded, by the side of life’s road – at least for a while. Losing your job is right up there with the Three Big D’s: Death, Divorce, Depression (both economic and of the individual mind). No less than Sigmund Freud put working at a job right up there with sex, family, loved ones and life’s other undeniable virtues – things that still provide a solid bedrock for us as we race madly about, living and consuming (well, we used to consume before last Fall’s economic debacle kicked into high gear) here in our 21st Century Age of Information.
Monday’s NYT had this disturbing headline: “Big Companies Around Globe Lay Off Tens of Thousands,” (Jack Healy, Jan 26, 2009), recounting in agonizing detail the numbers of all those people who will come home to their loved ones, families, cats, dogs, goldfish and whatever, with the really bad news that they no longer have a job. Most mature adults, without a fortune salted away to take them out of the Rat Race, define themselves by their jobs, mentioning what they do for a living right up front with our names and the obligatory ‘who do you know,’ when we first meet others in social settings.