Recession Blues: Balancing the Budget on the Backs of the Working Class

Maybe I had my head stuck in the sand, trying hard to believe the Great Recession was just going to pass Seattle on by. I’d tried hard to ignore the facts—two of my friends had just been laid off, one other has been unemployed now for over a year, and another two are currently taking mandatory unpaid leave days. I guess I’m like most people, though—until it affects us directly, it just doesn’t really sink in. But when I received Mayor Greg Nickel’s e-mail at work the other day notifying us of impending layoffs and a proposed unpaid furlough plan for city workers, I have to say I was a little shocked. Maybe it was the way I received the message; there were no informative meetings with supervisors, and no communication from my union, which apparently had known about it for quite some time. There was just a brief e-mail from the mayor to myself and my fellow city workers, with the story appearing in the Seattle Times later that morning. Managers must just love e-mail—none of that messy face-to-face interaction with employees when it comes to unpleasant news.

In retrospect, I guess I should have seen it coming. The Port of Seattle, the Seattle Public Library, and King County Library have huge budget shortfalls, forcing them to make cuts and force unpaid leave days. King County has even proposed closing 39 parks and Animal Control, in addition to unpaid leave days for 2009 and 2010.

But the city of Seattle itself? I had assumed it was well-run, as governments go, and that the city economy had just been chugging along, immune to any type of California-type implosion. We have Boeing and Microsoft, right? And our unemployment is not too high, at least compared to the rest of the nation.

Now suddenly we’re $72.5 million short, and City Light is in even worse shape—time to slam on the breaks, lay off hundreds of workers, and force us to take unpaid leave. Potential layoffs and reduction in pay worry me, but it pisses me off, too: how can management run the city into the ground, and then expect the lower paid workers to make financial sacrifices to bail them out? It just doesn’t seem fair. It’s a little like how the Big Boys at the banks and investment firms wrecked their companies and the economy, then expected the taxpayers to bail them out, at a huge cost to you and me. Pretty soon those on the top were back in the game, once again receiving their million dollar bonuses—while we got unpaid leave, unemployment, and further erosion of our health care.

Our union here did eventually get around to explaining to us that there would definitely be layoffs—less layoffs if we voted to approve 10 days of unpaid leave next year for our 6,700 members, more job cuts if we voted it down. I won’t tell you how I voted—only that I held my nose when I filled out the ballot. Let’s see—cut my own throat—er, pay—or that of my fellow workers?

While a day a month in unpaid leave may not seem like much to most managers, it will amount to a $220 drop in income for me. This will mean scrambling to cut costs—no cable, eating lots of spaghetti, library videos, setting the thermostat back to sixty degrees in the winter and bundling up, and no replacing that aging car. And though this is inconvenient to me, I imagine a single head-of-household family with kids will find it even harder to make ends meet, should the unpaid furlough days—or layoffs—be enacted.

Sadly, no one has said much in defense of those public employees—though there are 6,700 union workers, with an eventual possible total affected of 11,000 (total union and non-union employees) at the city of Seattle. Perhaps it’s because it’s somehow become fashionable to beat up on unions and the public sector—we’re greedy and lazy, right?

Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Because the truth is, many of my fellow employees make less money than their private counterparts, and most of them are hard-working individuals who have dedicated their lives to serving the public. They are the maintenance workers that beautify your parks and government grounds; the library assistants that keep your libraries running smoothly; and the health care workers that serve the poor at county health clinics.

Just remember that the next time you go to a park to play with your children, only to find the playgrounds fenced off, and the park closed. Remember it when you go to your city library, and it too is closed, the employees all off on unpaid leave.