[quote=sdrealtor]A line worker is one who works in production or at a staff level position. Not a management position responsible for a dept or with employees below them they are reponsible for. Its not a derogatory description and so nice of you to try to make it sound so. If anything its a very clinical term.
While you are here CAR instead of being noticably absent from this thread do you think a $250K household income is a normal reasonable income for a couple of young 30ish public sector employees? Additionally as you often claim public sector workers are underpaid relative to the private sector do you think they’d be making over 300K in the private sector as non-business owners or SR management? You do realize that income puts them in the top 1 or 2 % of wage earners in the country and thats without considering the generous retirement contributions made on their behalf.[/quote]
Firstly, I’ve never heard the term “line worker” defined that way, nor have I found that definition for the term in the short amout of time I’ve just spent trying to find that definition or one similar to it. Based on your definition, almost everyone is a “line worker,” including teachers and professors; engineers employed by a company; doctors and nurses employed by a hospital or HMO, etc; athletes who are employed by a team; actors who work for a studio/employer; fund managers who work for a financial firm; etc. That’s a pretty broad description. I don’t think that’s what you meant when you said, “line worker.” Based on many of your previous comments about public sector workers, I believe you meant to imply that public sector workers are somehow unskilled and/or uneducated. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Regarding your claim that I said public workers were underpaid, please link to the post where I claimed that public sector workers were underpaid relative to private sector workers.
What I did say was that the standards for public employment are usually higher than for similar jobs in the private sector.
Perhaps you were thinking of this study:
“In this report we use publicly available data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, along with an established methodology used by researchers since the 1970s, to compare worker earnings across and between private, state, and local sectors. We analyze differences in pay between each sector as reported for the last several
decades, up to and including the latest estimates. We also estimate the variation of these trends across some of the largest states.”
“Public and private workforces differ in important • ways. For instance, jobs in the public sector require much more education on average than those in the private sector. Employees in state and local sectors are twice as likely as their private sector counterparts to have a college or advanced degree.
Wages and salaries of state and local employees are • lower than those for private sector workers with comparable earnings determinants (e.g., education). State employees typically earn 11 percent less; local workers earn 12 percent less.”
I’ve also said that private sector workers have lost ground because they’ve been apathetic about protecting their interests and they’ve bought into the lies that “unions are bad,” and “globalization is good.” The consequences are obvious. Never wavered on that one — it’s why private sector workers are now so easily manipulated against public sector workers.
It’s not a coincidence, either. The people who “outsourced” all the private sector jobs are the very ones who are behind the attacks on public sector workers. Intelligent people will research this in an effort to understand WHY they are being manipulated (again), and who stands to benefit from it. These attacks on workers are NOT driven by taxpayer advocates, the entities behind the attacks are seeking to privatize public resources and revenue streams. Public unions are the last obstacle they need to overcome in order to attain their goals.
