Public Sector Employees are not Volunteers

I miss the days I could greedily absorb news site after news site but the great irony of being in j-school is that I read less news than  I did when I had a 9 to 5 desk job. Or maybe I read more sources and have less time to actually peruse websites.

I set up a Google Alert for fed-prov relations news and an opinion piece from the National Post showed up,  "A Wage Cut for Alberta's Future."

After living in Alberta for two years it has a special place in my heart that these types of headlines target.

The gist of the article is that public sector employees in Alberta - including public servants, teachers, nurses and doctors - get paid way too much as compared to counterparts across the country.

As a former public service employee, I was really troubled by the content of the piece as well as its conclusion that Alberta will have to make cuts and spend less on its public sector employees:

"If Alberta does not want a repeat of those tough times, it needs to control public workers' wages now."

Photo: Courtesy of Flickr user Natasha Moorfield

 Public spending means WAY more than simply public sector salaries. There is also the revenue side - who the province collects money from and how often. But that could be the subject of a whole series of posts.

I have a problem with problematizing well-paid public sector employees.

These quotes (among others), show the deep failure in logic:

"Senior provincial bureaucrats bring home salaries as good as or better than their federal counterparts, even though they are administering a jurisdiction only about one-tenth as large as the country as a whole."

A federal bureaucrat does not go to their job every day and take care of business across this whole nation - they have a specific role within the organization. Just because you work for a multi-national corporation doesn't mean you should get paid more than working for a local business because the assumption is you work simultanously in all those countries.

"For every new dollar Alberta has brought in - nearly $11-billion extra a year - 95¢ has gone into the pockets of civil servants and other public-sector workers."

What is the baseline number that is being worked with and where did that money go? If $11 billion is the new money, I bet there are way more dollar bills in the baseline.

Beyond this - public sector workers do the WORK. It shouldn't be surprising that a significant amount of the public sector budget goes to the people who run our hospitals, teach our children and work to enhance our quality of life.

"Most of the extremely generous public-sector wage and fee agreements that have led to this explosion in pay were signed by the current Tory government in the name of securing labour peace and at a time when the government was awash in resource revenue."

The piece repeatedly alludes to fat cats and agreements made during the province's heyday. It fails to mention the negotiation failure to put in a collective agreement with Alberta Union of Public Employees working within the Alberta government's program and services.

Negotiations failed in September 2010 and an agreement was not voted upon by it's membership until April 2011. This was after a health benefit was suspended and cost-of-living increases were frozen as a result of the stalled agreement.

The agreement in the end was fair but the delay was a frustration for many. It certainly wasn't negotiated with a government willing to write a blank cheque.

I am just sick of the unsophisticated attacks on public sector employees using basic numbers and comparisons. There are LOTS of stories journalists can go after within the public service - some of them may even be positive (gasp!).  A little bit of research, reading and FOIing may do journalists a great service.

One of the reasons I went into the field is to tell government stories and focus on policies and not politics. I hope I last in this field.

But back on topic, at the end of the day: Do you want a public sector worker that is happy and feels recognized and compensated for their work, or some one that is looking for a job in the private sector that will help them meet their financial needs?

Public sector workers should not have to be martyrs just because they choose to devote their lives to public service. 

Instead of advocating to punish them we should be advocating for Alberta's provincial and federal counterparts to up the ante and do the same for their public sector employees.