The thing I keep coming back to about the imminent BART strike is the same thing I go to with all manner of public-employee labor disputes: these are the last people to get screwed. People talk about their zero-contribution defined-benefit pensions as if this is some sort of mystical ice cream land – when this used to be a regular thing. Seriously. I still have a piece of one myself from my first job, which I started in 1997. With an old and conservative and slow-to-change organization, sure, but we’re not talking about some sort of cloud-cuckoo-land.
In fact, what we’re talking about is a lot of what kept people working in public-service jobs for a long time: the promise that you were giving up cash up front now in exchange for a secure and reliable retirement. Corporate America realized it was cheaper and easier to match some money up front, trumpet the ownership society, and make people do their own retirement financial planning (or better yet, line the pockets of the financial services industry to kinda-sorta-halfass it). But for the most part, government retirement stayed the same: with no shareholder value to maximize and with things like collective bargaining and workplace rights protected in ways the private sector circumvented to a fault, the public sector remained an echo of the days when you could stay with an employer for thirty years and retire in good stead.
Supposedly, BART employees haven’t had a raise in four years. That’s the other annoying thing: the idea that this notional platinum-encrusted retirement is so generous that asking for a raise is the height of impudence. But then again, that’s the Southern way: don’t worry about your penurious circumstances now because you’ll get milk and honey and fried catfish in Heaven. Oddly enough, for some reason this deal is never that attractive to the ones offering it. But here on Earth, you can’t pay your mortgage with the promise of a gainful retirement – shit costs money. And prices haven’t really been dropping these last four years – gas is still over $4 a gallon and the cable bill never goes any lower. For all the Fed’s and the Street’s fretting about the inflation risk and damping it down, it hasn’t made stuff cheaper.
No, what happened was that there were jobs that paid and jobs that didn’t. The jobs that paid got moved to where they could pay people less, and the jobs that didn’t pay so good – the sorts of things filled by high school kids on summer break – stuck around. We hollowed out that space where people without a professional degree could make a living and raise a family on one income. There are only a few left, and the people who have them are going to defend them to the very last. As well they should. “We already screwed everybody else to take your turn” is no reason to accept a screwing yourself.