11.07.11
An economic system that steals labor …
Immorality disguised as frugality is on display in a news story on using private contracting to outsource what was formerly a way to make a living.
Today, in the New York Times, it reads:
Like many states and local governments struggling to cut costs, Michigan hopes to replace some government employees with contract workers who will do the same job for less.
Ginny Townsend, a nursing assistant under a state contract, attending to Harold Sundberg at a veterans facility in Michigan.
Ginny Townsend, 41, took a job in January as a nursing assistant in the state-run home for veterans here. Technically, she works for a private company that supplies some employees to the veterans home under a state contract. She makes $10 an hour, about half the wage of the public employees working at the facility.
With the national unemployment rate at roughly 9 percent, Ms. Townsend says she feels lucky just to have a job. But on her low wages, she is barely scraping by. She said she was raising four randchildren under 11 with her unemployed sister and could not support them without the $300 in food stamps she collects every month …
The lower wage, she says, has left her strained to cover $675 a month in rent, along with basics like food and child care. So Ms. Perttu collects $400 monthly in food stamps and child care assistance, programs administered by the state but largely financed by the federal government. She has not been able to buy winter coats for her children, she said, and often avoids calls from credit card bill collectors.
At the veteran’s home, “one check was enough to pay all the bills,??? she said. Drawing on public assistance, she added, “is not helping our economy.???
This is so immoral it is difficult to know where to begin.
First, it deprives people of what was formerly a middle-class living in the name of austerity, rationalized that corporate America can do it better and cheaper by paying labor much less for the same work. And at the same time getting the workers out from under the protections and contracts which they are afforded by working for the government, the last place where unions can still sort-of-reasonably survive.
Second, it shoves the cost of slashing wages to just eking by off on the government, and taxpayer, by necessitating hunger be kept from the door through food stamp subsidization.
Third — corporate America vulture contracting makes its profit on the money the federal government must then make up with increased food stamp enrollment.
There is nothing efficient or free market about this. It’s economic parasitism and the stealing of labor, pure and simple.
And it’s using a bad economy, one in which people are desperate, to make corporate profit by making things worse. When the state slashes its payroll, it also loses more tax revenue, increasing the potentially downward spiral.
It is indeed remarkable that more people aren’t in the street with OWS.
What governments save in salaries and benefits often “ends up on the government books through all sorts of programs,??? Paul C. Light, “a professor at the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University” told the newspaper. He meant “unemployment insurance, Medicaid and other public assistance for workers earning low incomes.”
“Outsourcing becomes more popular during tough economic times as states and municipalities transfer the operations of facilities like prisons, school cafeterias and sanitation departments to private contractors,” it continues.
None of this makes any sense. It is merely expedient, momentarily superficially convenient and predatory. Repugnant on so many levels, it merely shows how failed and unfair the United States is at every level one cares to examine.
The census report found that the poverty rate for all groups would have jumped to 18 percent — or 6 million more people — if it weren’t for the earned income tax credit, a safety net program which offers credits to low- and moderate-income families as an incentive to work and to help offset the burden of Social Security taxes. Temporary expansions to that program are slated to expire after next year.
Without food stamps, the poverty rate would have risen to 17.7 percent, which translates to about 5 million more people. That program was expanded in 2009 as part of the federal stimulus plan; the expansions are now phasing out gradually and will expire completely in 2014.
Because of the drive to private contract for workers in state health care facilities engendered a lawsuit stopping it in Michigan.
The Times interviewed the person who levied the suit who explained it in this way:
The lawsuit, filed by Anthony Spallone, a resident, says that fill-in contract workers have, among other things, repeatedly dropped residents and left them in urine-soaked beds, and once fed a resident solid food despite specific instructions not to.
Tim Frain, the chief executive of J2S [the company furnishing the reduced wage contract workers], declined to comment.
Mr. Spallone, a 64-year-old Vietnam veteran who said he had served “12 months, eight days, four hours and 22 minutes??? as an Army engineer, described the state’s caregivers as “like family.??? He suggested the government “drop one less bomb overseas and pay these guys’ salaries.???
“We’re just driving everybody down,” someone adds.