In Wisconsin, like the rest of the nation, public employees are retiring in droves. At this time last year, for example, Wisconsin had approximately 4,000 retirees. This year the number is almost 8,000. What has caused the drastic increase in the number of retirees? Most retirees expressed the fear of losing their retirement benefits. While this is probably true, my suspicions are that it probably goes much deeper than that.
Law enforcement officers, firefighters, social workers, and teachers are highly trained and highly respected professionals, whose occupations require levels of dedication and commitment that goes beyond the work-hours for which they are paid. But more importantly, the men and women in these professions bring to their jobs levels of passion, devotion, and loyalty that are priceless: Service to their communities, their fellow citizens, and their nation are just as important, and in many cases more important, than their salaries. The adulations and respect of their leaders, their fellow workers, and the citizens they serve are more precious to them, than mare monetary rewards.
Recently, however, all this changed. It changed with the election of key republican governors, who decided to balance their budgets on the backs of the middle class, and decided that labeling public employees as “greedy, overpaid, unscrupulous, incompetent, and inconsiderate” workers,” was the key strategy for doing so.
Overnight, the respected professions of public employees became the resented professions of overpaid public workers. And their knowledge, skills and years of experiences were marginalized, as the added burden of lower wages, grater cost for benefits, and the uncertainty concerning the future of their retirement benefits became major concerns.
The older, retirement-age workers, hoping to preserve their dignities, their respect in the eyes of the public, their retirements, ― and their sanities, decided to “call it” ― quit.
So now the states are facing the challenges of trying to fill the large shoes of the wonderful workers who left. But you will never know it, because the governors and their staffs are down-playing these challenges. “We are not worrying about it,” one of the governors remarked a few days ago. “It will give us the opportunity to bring bright, young workers into these professions,” he continued.
But it makes me wonder “How dedicated, committed, and passionate are these young workers going to be after witnessing the despicable treatment that their predecessors received?”
The only thing that is certain about the “bright, young group of workers” that are entering these professions is the fact that their governors are going to be placing greater demands on them, while paying them less than their predecessors, and charging them more for their benefits. If they’re lucky, who knows, they might even have retirement benefits ― when they retire!
