I've been a federal employee - a civil servant, people used to say - for fifteen years. I joined the army in 2004 and served for a bout four and a half years. After a brief and miserable stint in the private sector working for a dental insurance company for less than a year, I returned to the army to work as a civilian. Since then I've worked for the army and the navy as a medical clerk, a secretary at a substance abuse clinic, and in a variety of financial management positions.
In that time I've served under three very different presidents. The landscape of politics has changed immeasurably. One thing which hasn't really changed much is a certain level of disdain, sometimes veering into hostility, toward federal workers. In the best of times people would complain about how I had a pension, cheap healthcare, thirty vacation days a year, and eleven federal holidays off, and how nobody in the private sector was getting anything like that anymore. My response to that was typically "Why don't you unionize, then?" or, if I'm being more accurate, "Why did you let conservatives chip away at organized labor and its protections for the last forty years if you wanted those things for yourselves?" But that's a subject for a whole other blogpost.
The lowest ebb of my admittedly short tenure was when Sarah Palin declared that the federal government had never created a single solitary job. For years that became a common refrain in conservative circles.
It was bullshit at the time, and it made me roll my eyes. With a workforce of two million, the federal government is the largest single employer in the United States. That's not counting contractors, of course, who constitute about four million employees. If you throw in half a million postal workers, one-and-a-half million active duty military members, and another one-and-a-half million grant employees, the total is nearly ten million.
The labor force in America is about 162 million, which means that Uncle Sam is directly cutting a check to an eye-blistering 6% of the population. And that's not even getting into the ancillary businesses - restaurants outside of a government building, or dry cleaners which wouldn't exist except for the military base in town, etc. At that point the numbers get kind of cutesy, so I'm just going to leave that alone, except to point out that, yeah, with 6% of the population not getting a paycheck, a significant portion of the other 94% is going to feel the pain.
Of course, we're not in that kind of a doomsday scenario now. A scant quarter of the government is shut down, and with it, nearly 800,000 federal workers - disregarding, of course, all of the collateral contractors, etc.
And now I'm watching - not without a certain amount of perverse glee, I'll be the first to admit - as the people who shat all over what I do for a decade and a half are are coming face-to-face with the reality that we're not all leeches. That we do, in fact, serve a purpose. And that the federal government, Governor Palin, does in fact create jobs. Nearly 6% of them, and that's if we're being extremely modest.
I'm also watching with some glee to learn that my fellow civil servants are turning to some tried-and-true old organized labor methods to express their displeasure. Many TSA agents are calling out sick. Other departments are finding their unpaid workforce decimated by requests for hardship leave. I wonder to what extent slowdowns and work-to-rules and other job actions are also taking place now.
It's very easy for Republicans to shrug and say, "Ah, well, nobody would miss the government anyway." Now that we're actually seeing it, for, realistically speaking the first time ever, I'm delighted. Not by the hardship and suffering of my fellow civil servants, that is a terrible outcome. I'm delighted that everyone who's ever complained about how the government doesn't do anything, and how we're all useless is being forced to eat their words. In a few weeks when Joe Six-Pack doesn't get his tax refund, it's going to be anarchy on the streets.
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