The Tribune hates state workers perhaps more than Rod Blagojevich:
• A wage and hiring freeze: The Civic Federation of Chicago proposes capped or reduced state spending. Businesses throughout this state are freezing wages and hiring—some are cutting salaries. Quinn will have to ask for sacrifices in wages and increases in employee benefit contributions.
So we gut departments like DNR for years and then we need to create a hiring freeze to ensure that are parks continue to be degraded because the department is to decimated to do conservation right. Blagojevich scapegoated the ‘bureaucrats’ every day for the last six years and ensured they couldn’t do their jobs well by reducing needed positions and then sending legit funding to political cronies. The reason that the state could reduce the state workforce so much was because Blagojevich didn’t care if the state workforce did their jobs. Now is the not the time to freeze hiring, it’s time to evaluate realistic needs and in some places hire more people. Perhaps hire back some in DNR. Don’t believe me–go spend time in an Illinois State Park and you’ll see significant facility quality loss.
It’s as if the Tribune didn’t notice the last six years. But wait, they do:
• Lower-cost internal services: It’s senseless for taxpayers to fund full-time employees, with extraordinary benefits, to perform food, janitorial, technology and other internal services that easily can be outsourced. This is a simple way for Quinn to meet his pledge to “cut, cut, cut” state costs.
Imagine that, the state provides decent jobs to people who work for it. The horror. They can literally clean our toilets and serve our food, but they ought not to be provided a decent wage and reasonable benefits. Maybe we can go back to the DNR and have outside contractors paying kids to cut the grass in state parks. I’m sure they’ll be very concerned with the job they do and the overall impact on the ecology of the park.
The carnard the Trib’s editorial board relies upon is that jobs will go off to low tax states. The problem with that claim? Companies don’t want to relocate to Mississippi and elsewhere because they need an educated, capable workforce. Why hasn’t Cat completely moved it’s manufacturing out of the United States? Because they have a better labor pool in the United States. Illinois specifically has a well trained workforce and infrastructure to maintain highly skilled workers.
An educated workforce needs investment in education. For the last six years our universities have been underfunded and need investment to be strong institutions or in the U of I’s case, to remain one of the best public universities in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in the nation. \
More fine moments in Trib stupidity:
The education industry: If schools are to get more money, the governor needs to demand corresponding reforms in how they spend the money they get today—and in how they do, or don’t, improve student outcomes. Will Quinn demand pension reform in school labor contracts? Easier paths to firing the relatively few lousy teachers? More money only for districts that agree to spend it on tactics—such as smaller class sizes in the lower grades—that certifiably produce better educations for kids?
Unfortunately, smaller class size doesn’t produce better education for kids according to the consensus of research. Certainly class sizes above 35 start to have detrimental effects on student performance in some respects, but the difference between 20 and 30? Not significant. There are good reasons to maintain reasonable class sizes related to teacher sanity and such, but the problem isn’t class size, it’s generally teacher quality. That’s a tougher issue and I’m sure the Trib will advocate something attacking the unions, but the unions aren’t the primary problem and in fact, are very supportive of efforts to create programs for master teachers and effective mentoring for new teachers. Oh, and expand early childhood education.
If you hate government and insist it cannot work, it won’t. However, if you want to not just pretend to be serious, but to look at the actual problems and find solutions, cutting workers and privatizing aren’t magical solutions to default to every time. It’s a cop out–the kind of cop out Blagojevich and Daley have tried to time and again with poor results.