Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind Read Online Free Page B

service—that America needs more government workers to serve our nation. But is it really true anymore? How much “service” does our nation really need? And are we paying our government employees too much?

READY TO BE A PUBLIC SERVANT?
    Here’s one real federal government job that you might consider. Go be an “invitation coordinator” for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 15 You’ll send out invitations, handle RSVPs, and be like a government wedding planner. Applicants must be highly qualified to “serve as expert on calendar issues”—after all, mixing up Mondays and Tuesdays is a challenge too many Americans have to face every day, especially consumers invited to parties at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
    So, what can you expect to receive as compensation for your in-demand invitation coordinating service? Try a starting salary of up to $103,000, plus five weeks of vacation. Your local stationery store isn’t likely to give you that. Plus, with government employment, the government will pick up 75 percent of your health insurance premiums with “coverage for preexisting conditions, and no waiting periods,” not to mention a cushy retirement program. Are you ready to enter “public service” yet?

Government Service Lifestyle
    Government workers must work harder than workers in the private sector for all that extra pay and benefits, right? You decide. A news team investigation in Pittsburgh tracked edits to Wikipedia, the open-source website where anyone can log in to change facts about events, people, and objects. The news team found “thousands of edits done by government employees on government time using government computers.And few of those edits have anything to do with government business.” What were these intrepid scholars up to? They were editing the Wikipedia pages for Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, singer Beyoncé, and James Bond. One employee edited the profile for Lurch, the butler on
The Addams Family
—he added the valuable information that Lurch didn’t actually play the harpsichord. Another employee wrote a full plot summary for a
Star Wars
TV series. Overall, the news team found 1,536 edits by state employees and 5,542 edits by federal offices. And, as the news team pointed out, “Wikipedia is just one Web site.” 23
    Even if these wiki-employees are an aberration, we do know that government employees tend to be in the office less often than workers in businesses. Federal employees get a whopping 13 days of sick leave, 10 federal holidays, and up to 26 additional days of vacation for a total of up to 49 days of paid time off per year. Because unions encourage their workers to use all their “sick” days as holidays instead of just when they are actually sick, government workers get the equivalent of up to ten paid weeks of vacation per year—that’s equal to working a four-day workweek every week! 24 How would your business do with you gone that much?
    There are lots of other benefits of working for the government, too. According to Steven Greenhut in his book
Plunder!
“Drivers of one out of every 22 cars on California roads have special license plates whereby their addresses are kept secret from toll agencies and parking enforcement agencies. When an officer pulls over someone with one of these plates, the addresses are in a special database that alerts the officer that the driver is a government worker, or fellow police officer, or a family member of someone in law enforcement or government work. The result is a de facto pass on many, if not most traffic laws by the drivers.” 25 If working for the government can get you out of speeding tickets, what can’t it do?
    On the downside, though, most union contracts prevent government workers from getting paid extra for good performance, although some government employees do get extra bonuses in the form of performance awards. 26 So if you don’t feel like having your performance evaluated but