While your paycheck decreases, managers get $4 grand pay raise
There are two Americas. John Edwards was right.
But not in the way that the Anthony Weiner of the last decade could have ever imagined.
The two Americas are the Dreaded Private Sector, where the real unemployment rate hovers close to 20 percent, and housing prices have taken a bigger plunge than they did during the Great Depression.
And then there’s Public Sector America, where the good times never end.
Just ask Gov. Deval Patrick. On a day when the stock market lost another 172 points, he announced that he’s handing out still more pay raises, this time to 4,000 state “managers,” also known as hacks.What a week. The secretary of state, Bill Galvin, gets a $10 million settlement from the thieves at Goldman Sachs, and the very next day Deval hands over the entire score to a different group of sticky-fingered payroll patriots.
No money for the state workers who actually do the menial labor, but plenty for the “managers.”
You know the kind of people who “manage” in state government. A lot of them drive state cars — with untraceable license plates, if they’re really connected. And they’ve all got fancy titles loaded with diminutives — “special assistant to the deputy director for the associate undersecretary.”
They telecommute on Fridays. And on snow days, well, would you care to guess if they’re essential or non-essential, or should I use the new hack euphemisms, “emergency” and “non-emergency.”
In case you were wondering, Deval’s 4,000 campaign contributors, I mean managers, didn’t really get a raise. It was a “wage adjustment.”
It had to be done, Deval said in a statement, in order to “retain and recruit a talented and competitive work force.”
Are you kidding, Deval? Has anyone ever quit the public payroll except under extreme personal duress? Like, as part of a plea bargain. Deval’s flack said that state managers have made “incredible sacrifices.” Right — several agencies have cancelled their weekly popover eating contests at Anthony’s Pier 4.
There’s a Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken.” It sums up the difference between the two Americas.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by.”
The hack road, in other words. It’s less traveled by because it was Monday and everybody phoned in sick. Then they “worked” for three days and all of them banged in sick again on Friday. The road less taken . . .
“And that has made all the difference.”
It did for Tom Kinton. If the outgoing boss of Massport had taken the DPS Road, he’d probably be working now at a service desk somewhere in Shoppers World. Instead, he walks out the door groaning under the weight of all his gelt — a $200,000 pension, $459,000 in what is called unused sick time, another $80,000 in insurance policy dividends . . .
Getting a hack job at an early age. To paraphrase Frost, that makes all the difference.
GOOD TIMES ROLL: Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick
just OK’d a raise for the state’s 4,000 managers.
Donnie Howie Michael Bill
Unlike the others, we tell you what's really happening.
