Homestead mailing list

[Marie McHarry <mmcharry AT gmail.com>]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 11:27 PM, Lynda <lurine AT com-pair.net> wrote:
> And, I think Marie's statements give you the answer to her angst.  Bob said
> that taxpayer funded employees are a drain.  Marie is a taxpayer  funded
> employee.  Bob's comment was a generalization and I'm thinking Marie took it
> as a personal attack.

Well partially. Bob went off on state employees, and I are one and
know lots of them. State employment isn't all that lucrative, but it
still manages to acquire workers because of the benefits (your gall
bladder goes to hell, you can get it removed without going into
bankrutcy). OTOH, as I said, most state workers have one or two other
jobs because they like to eat on a regular basis, have a moderately
warm house (none that I know have admitted to anything over 65
degrees), and keep the cable hooked up. Over the years, Illinois has
come down as having fewer state workers per population than any other
state and it hasn't changed. When I went to work at the Board of
Education, it had nearly a thousand employees. Now we're under 600
(and maybe lower than that as.I haven't checked lately). Some of the
attrition is due to computerization of jobs that now take far less
paperwork. But much of it is simply a ssigning more duties to the
people who are there.

If the Legislature approves a program, somebody has got to oversee it.
You can oppose actually setting up the programs, but overseeing them
is necessary if only to voucher the expenses.

I work in teacher certification, and trust me, I share with many of
you skepticism about how much it's worth. OTOH, somebody will be doing
it, and why not me. They have a real deal with me. In addition to
evaluating transcripts and threading my way through our thicket of
rules, I can also write and edit and explain to the poor souls in the
field what they need to do to be in compliance with this or that. I
fancy that I'm really good at that.

As for my fellow employees, we have only a couple of slackers and
EVERYONE knows who they are. A couple of years we had a backlog of
files that was horrible (more than a year), but with employee
suggestions and, finally, some cooperation from management we cleared
it up. As far as I can tell, management still hates us for that.
>
> Now, having worked for the Feds and at the county and city level, and having
> collected a pay check from those same taxpayer dollars, I can tell you that
> a great big % of my fellow employees were professional gold bricks!

 I find that amazing. I know ('cause I've looked at the stats) that
other state governments have far more workers in every category than
Illinois does. We just don't have anyone, even our slackers, who
doesn't contribute. Until our boss turned into a vision of hell and
began to accuse us of not working (she seems to be bipolar, but that
may be aggravated by her being one of  Rod B's pay to play people, and
she knows her (very large) butt is on the line), we rarely even took
breaks, and lots of us ate lunch at our desks while we worked. Now,
we're actually taking breaks and lunch, and it's really quite a nice
change.


I
> personally think that the whole paid holidays and sick leave thing are
> ridiculous with the sick leave being massively abused!  Anyone, and I mean
> ANYONE who says otherwise is playing pretend!  Government employees, in
> general, take longer breaks, longer lunch hours, do more personal business
> on the clock and take more items home than private sector employees!

No kidding? California must be an interesting place to work. Here,
people have hundreds of days of sick time that they won't use even if
they have ebola because they can transfer it to their retirement.
>
> Ya know, I was no model employee and I'm certainly not a whiz kid at what I
> did.  What I am is someone who is easily bored <g>  I need to be busy.

I work with two dozen people like you. Illinois taxpayers are getting
their money's worth. Sorry about California, but it looks like you're
in the toilet in any case.

Marie