My earlier post about how some of the people getting fired by Musk-Trump are also getting abuse from their friends and relatives showed how those people seemed to view the fired federal workers as somehow parasites, enjoying a life of luxury off the backs of hardworking taxpayers and doing little to earn their keep, just goofing off while drawing a paycheck.
This misunderstands the nature of work. I suspect that most people, whether in the public or private sector, take pride in doing a good job. It is part of one’s sense of self-worth to know that one is pulling one’s weight and not dragging other people down. It is usually just those who have been treated badly by their employers who try to get away with doing nothing, perhaps out of a sense of grievance or getting revenge. Some of course are incorrigibly lazy but I doubt that they constitute more than a tiny fraction.
Furthermore, people tend to take pride in the place they work for being held in high regard, because that esteem rubs off on them. For example, when I was working for the (private) university, I noticed that many of the secretarial and maintenance staff, hardly the highly paid top brass, would be willing to do extra to avoid anything that might reflect badly on the institution, or their part of it, even though there was no direct reward for going that extra mile. Similarly students, while perfectly willing to grumble about high tuition or other complaints, nevertheless took pride in the niceness of the campus and its facilities and took pleasure when the university was portrayed in a positive light in the media. People like to feel they belong to an organization that is seen as worthy of respect because then they also feel respected.
You will see this everywhere, if you care to look.
So what drives this anger towards federal workers who by and large tend to be dedicated public servants? I suspect that it is the age of age-old vice of some people feeling better about themselves and their lot when they see others doing badly and suffering setbacks. It is a variation of schadenfreude. It reflects a sense of smug self-satisfaction, that since they still have their jobs and income and security, they must be somehow better than the rabble who now suddenly face ruin. This is why those people feel so aggrieved when the firings are indiscriminate and the ax falls on them too, as so many of the MAGA supporters are now feeling when they too lose their jobs. Those Trumpers who were told that they were fired for poor performance without any evidence and despite having received positive performance reviews are particularly aggrieved. If the comments to that article are any indication, those who voted for Trump and now feel hurt that they too have lost their jobs are not getting much sympathy from the general public.
the people who were the easiest to let go were parks employees, because you don’t see an immediate negative effect, unlike shutting down every place you can get a passport or find out why your social security check isn’t coming through in time to make your mortgage payment. but do we want our national parks to be disaster-prone deathtraps with no trained personnel in sight when things go wrong? wanna take the people out of fire towers?
is there actually any place in the government with truly wasteful and redundant jobs? if there are, wouldn’t the best way to approach the problem be taking the time to understand what the redundancies are, coming up with new streamlined operations that don’t require as many people, implementing them through legal processes? no? just burn the government to ash and rebuild from cremains with disposable easily fired inexperienced people? like the guys who don’t adequately clean the meat slicer at the walmart deli? that’s who we want to perform essential operations?
it’s governance by vandalism, fueled by decades of mutated medieval antisemitic conspiracy theories and the paid-for propaganda of wanna-be robber barons. well, now they’re going to get to be robber barons again. now the howling hateful fringe of ameriKKKa has every legal lever of power, and can confidently use illegal means like death threats and terrorism against any politician who doesn’t get in line, knowing they will be exonerated by der fuhrer.
we are finding out what that looks like. i hate it a lot.
“Insulting Federal Workers” is the mother of all understatements. Perhaps a better title would have been “Scapegoating and Blood-Libeling Federal Workers.”
Because we all either get paid by, or pay to the government, are we not all federal workers? We’re just arguing about who’s a boss and who’s and employee.
While I do not disagree that a certain amount of feeling “we’re glad we’re still employed’ might exist, I think there is, in fact, a deeper cause, and that’s in the way certain people perceive public sector employment.
First, there seems to be a belief, not just in the USA but around the world, that work which does not generate any income is not really work. No matter how many hours Mano puts into writing this blog, he isn’t doing any work because he’s not getting paid. Wait, mano gets $0.02 every month? Well, then Mano is doing work. Public sector workers are in positions where they get paid, but the organization they work for is, by design, not making a profit. This leads to a belief that no one employed in the public sector is really doing work, they are being paid by the citizens tax-dollars. The more extreme view is the libertarian one where government takes money by force through taxation and wastes it by hiring people to perform work which could be performed by the private sector at a profit to someone. The idea that all the citizens profit by the work of public employees just does not occur to them.
But this initial believe strengthens the second prong of the dislike of federal employees. The belief that for-profit companies will work hard to reduce waste and increase efficiency in their tasks because of the profit motive. Anyone who’s worked in the private sector and paid attention should know this is complete bollocks. There is wasted resources at private companies of all sizes, and personally, having done some work in the public sector as well as the private, I find the public employees tend to be more dedicated to their jobs, more aware of the tasks they are expected to complete, and have a greater pride in their work. They also generally get fairly decent wages, which may mean that they are not constantly trying to figure out how to survive, but can concentrate on their jobs. But this idea that private enterprise is more efficient than public enterprise is so pervasive that there are a lot of people who believe that we should privatize a lot of the tasks our government performs. People who believe that a privatized park service would be more efficient at spotting and putting out fires, be better at rescuing people who are lost or injured, and be more courteous to visitors. It is impossible to convince these people that the evidence shows that the management of for-profit companies will screw over everybody in order to increase their own paycheck. Workers will not be paid as well, lowering moral and retention. Passive monitoring and safety systems will be reduced in scope or eliminated altogether (“There have been no fires recently, we don’t need that fire tower.”). Functions which were once free (or fairly cheap and subsidized) will be charged for (okay, so the ranger had to give you 2 liters of water because you were dehydrated on the trail. That’s 2 hours of the rangers time, the minimum billing amount, at $120/hour and $20 for the water; $260 please).
The dismantling of the federal government is showing at least some people that the work done by federal employees is important. I don’t think it is doing anything to counter their belief that the private sector could do those tasks more efficiently. I think a good deal of the feeling that some people have about the firing of public service is related to the above two ideas:
1. What you were doing was not work because there is no profit motive driving it.
2. If the tasks do need to be done, they should have been done by a private company which has a motivation to eliminate waste. Everything the government does is wasteful because no one makes a profit from it.
Both these ideas, as prevalent as they are, are wrong.
flex @#4, excellent analysis, thanks!
To support what Mano said about people taking pride in the job: I’ve been out traveling, and yesterday found me on some really small-town rural roads. I came upon a diner in the middle of nowhere with two cars parked in front of it, but I needed a break from driving so I went in. The front-of-house staff was a middle-aged woman and a late-teenaged man. With a total of five people to serve, both of them were working, working, working all the time--if they weren’t bringing more drinks or otherwise taking care (in the best sense of the word) their customers, they were cleaning.
I also agree with @5; flex that was truly excellent. And I also recommend yesterday’s comment from BeBe Melange that there’s some reactivity leftover from Covid. Some people just resent being told not to do the stupid thing.
I wonder what the overlap is between people who think family is some sacrosanct thing handed down from the heavens and those who think it’s okay to kick their relatives while they’re going through a hard time? I’m guessing it’s a pretty significant overlap.
I am firmly of the belief that people who act like that deserve no part of your life. It’s not good but it’s okay to be wrong sometimes or buy into bad ideas. But taking ideas that can trivially be proved false and using them as an excuse to punch down at people you supposedly have a deep, indivisible bond with? Yeah no, you’re just lying about the bond so you can gaslight and abuse the other person. And that’s why I think the only healthy response is to tell them to have a nice life but fuck right off and get out of yours.
BTW I forgot, who is that awful woman from the US government on Fox News who said the laid off veterans were not suitable to do their jobs? That interview needs to be on TV ads all over the nation.
birgerjohannsson @#8,
That was Alina Habba, Trump’s lawyer, who is now a legal advisor in the White House.
Mano Singham @ 9
Aaaarghh, that woman is a female version of wossname, Stephen Miller. The one who looks like a half-baked vampire.
Conservative hostility to government workers in the USA is not just a new or recent phenomenon. My father spent most of his career working for the federal government and some of my more conservative relatives made it clear that they thought he had a cushy, overpaid job at taxpayer expense. Somewhat ironically, my father himself was fairly conservative when I was growing up (supporting Reagan, for example), before he turned more liberal due to disgust with George W. Bush.
Dog expresses appropriate feelings for Trump.
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